How Rick's traumatic childhood drove him to succeed

"IT'S A desperately poignant way to sum up one's childhood. "I remember being frightened all the time as a kid," recalls Rick. He traces the trauma to a grave tragedy in the family before he was even born.

It was four years earlier when his parents lost their five-year-old son David to meningitis and Rick believes his parents never recovered.

"I think losing him was probably just way too traumatic to get over for either of them. I think you just learn to live with that loss. Certainly for my mum, that was a very, very hard thing to do.

"My childhood was a bit odd. My dad was extreme at times and my mum was very much not there emotionally for us. I just don't think she had anything left." He was aged just four when his parents split up. His mother went to live with their gran while Rick and his three siblings were left to muddle through with their volatile father.

Though Horace was seldom violent, his moods were wildly unpredictable.

Rick was 12 when his father sold the family home in Merseyside, planning to move away and leave his children to fend for themselves.

When the logistics of his plans fell apart, they ended up living in a Portakabin next to Horace's garden centre.

Then one day when Rick was 17, one of his father's inexplicable rages saw him push Rick over and try to kick him. Rick's older brother Mike held a knife to their father's throat and said, "If you ****** move, I will kill you". Immediately afterwards, the brothers left home, Mike not even pausing to put shoes on, and they moved into their grandmother's house.

Rick, inevitably, longed for escape.

He was working in his father's garden centre and fronting a band called FBI when one day in 1985, Pete Waterman, of songwriting and production trio Stock, Aitken & Waterman, saw FBI perform and offered to sign Rick. In two years he was performing Never Gonna Give You Up on Top Of The Pops.

His first thought on hearing the song had gone to number one was, "I'm saved. I don't have to go and live in a Portakabin ever again".