On July 27th, 1987, a world-changing single was released.
A dance-pop song from a 21-year-old singer/songwriter under the tutelage of producing trio Stock Aitken Waterman, it would go on to top the charts in 25 countries.
33 years ago today...

The album (Whenever You Need Somebody) wasn't released until November 16th of the same year.
It first hit #1 on the US charts on March 12th, 1988.
I'm not sure when the video was released, though.

IMDB (because the video has an IMDB page, you know?) lists it as "September 1987" for the UK and just "1987" for the US.

If only MTV hadn't DMCA'd all those recordings off the internet or I could just scan through all of late 1987 videos and find the first play.

The IMDB page is here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4654462/

It was filled at the Harrow Club Sports Hall in London.
It's a community center founded in 1883 by a local church.
The outside scenes were filmed on Freston Road, where it's located.

You can still book the space for events, in case you want to visit this holy site.

https://www.harrowclubw10.org/book-our-space/ 

The meme of rickrolling comes from 4chan, and it's called such because of wordfilters.
In the mid-2000s 4chan had a bunch of random wordfilters on the /b/ board for silly reasons.

like "source" was filtered to "sauce", so instead of asking for the source of an image you'd end up asking for the sauce.

oh "noes" was filtered to "exploitable" so back when "OH NOES" was common internet slang, people'd say "OH EXPLOITABLE"

(basically moot (the creator of 4chan) hated a lot of the kind of forum lingo that was rampant on his site and screwed a bunch of it up with weird filters. the rest were just there because it was funny to make it hard to talk on /b/)

but at one point there was a filter involving the word "duck".
Now... sources disagree about which way this filter went (and a self-deleting forum from 15 years ago isn't very well documented)

but one explaination for what happened is that someone was talking about eggrolls, but "egg" was filtered to "duck", so it came out "duckroll".
duckroll became a meme, because it's a weird image.

That resulted in this image, and then it was uploaded as a video (with The Picard Song as the music), and this was provided as a troll-link when users were supposedly posting some content they actually wanted to see.

this was probably encouraged by "roll" sounding like "troll"
It was basically just a surrealism prank. Either tricking people to click it by giving it an enticing description, or giving it as a response when someone asks for a link to a video.

Duckroll seems to have originated around November-December 2006. It turned into "Rickrolling" in early 2007, reportedly because of two incidents:

1. In March 2007, The trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV was released on the Rockstar website.
This video was so popular that it ended up crashing the Rockstar website, leaving a lot of users to head to social media in search of mirrors.

Naturally 4chan posters helpfully provided a "mirror", which ended up being the Never Gonna Give You Up video.

Then in 2008, Youtube turned it from a minor 4chan meme to an internet-wide one:
For the 2008 April Fools Day joke, every video on the "featured videos" section of the frontpage lead to Never Gonna Give You Up.

BTW, one minor historical note:
So the version of the video that everyone used to link to was this copy, uploaded by the user "cotter548" in May 2007, titled "RickRoll'd".

That version has gone up and down several times over the years, but now the version you'd get when searching is the Official Rick Astley version, located here:

That version wasn't uploaded until 2009 when Rickrolling had long since taken off.
Despite that, it's by far the most popular version, currently standing at 729,145,724 views.
(The "Rickroll'd" cotter548 version is at 84,203,208 views)