Joe Cocker was a Sheffield soul singer who electrified Woodstock with his rasping voice and convulsive mannerisms
Joe Cocker Photo: Dezo Hoffmann/REX
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8:10PM GMT 22 Dec 2014
Joe Cocker, who has died aged 70, was a Sheffield-born singer who came to be considered one of the greatest white blues and soul vocalists. With a voice that could rage, bellow, rasp, screech or – if circumstance demanded – be unexpectedly yearning and vulnerable, he was capable of taking any song and making it his own.
Cocker proved this conclusively with his first and biggest hit, a cover of the Beatles’ With a Little Help From My Friends. Replacing the Fab Four’s cheerful, music-hall arrangement with his own tortured reading, Cocker topped the charts and so stunned Woodstock the following year that he established himself as rock’s most incendiary white soul singer.
It was a role for which he was perfectly suited. Honing his voice on a bottle of bourbon and 80 cigarettes a day, Cocker spent much of the Seventies in an alcohol and drug-fuelled haze. He reached the bottom in 1974 when the curtain was lowered on a performance in Los Angeles in which, having appeared in a vomit-encrusted jacket and cast-off jeans, he curled into the foetal position and was unable to continue.
But he was a survivor, for whom hair, sideboards, beard and stomach might come and go while his voice, if occasionally croaky, never let him down. Returning to the charts in 1982 with the Oscar-winning ballad Up Where We Belong, the theme to the hit movie An Officer and a Gentleman, Cocker enjoyed an Indian summer of sell-out tours and renewed chart success.
Cocker lived the stereotypical life of the blues. A wild man who earned – and paid for – his headlines, his career would have ended but for the majesty of his voice. He rarely wrote songs, but had no need. He had his own constituency. As Life magazine observed, he was “the voice of the blind criers and crazy beggars and maimed men who summon up the strength to bawl out their souls in the streets”.
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John Robert Cocker was born in Sheffield on May 20 1944. He left Sheffield Central Technical School at 15 to work as a gas fitter and perform as Vance Arnold, in which guise he supported the Rolling Stones and the Hollies at Sheffield City Hall.
As Joe Cocker’s Big Blues he recorded the Beatles’ I’ll Cry Instead, but the record failed to register. After a tour of GI bases in France and another stint with the Gas Board he teamed up with the keyboards player and bass guitarist Chris Stainton, and formed the Grease Band, whose first single, Marjorine, dented the foot of the charts.
It was the release of With a Little Help From My Friends that propelled Cocker into the big time. Claiming that he had worked out the arrangement in the outside loo of his father’s house, his trembling, tumultuous performance invested the song with such poignancy that the Beatles took out full-page advertisements in the music press praising his version.
But Cocker’s signature was not confined to his voice. His onstage mannerisms – legs bolted to the floor while his hands, arms and upper body convulsed – caused him to be likened to “a dancer in a wheelchair”. When he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show some members of the audience found it so distasteful that the singer was largely obscured by dancers.
Despite this, America embraced his furnace-like roar. His first album, With a Little Help From My Friends (1969), consisted mainly of covers bent on the anvil of his voice into personal and definitive readings. Throughout 1969 he toured extensively, appearing at all the major rock festivals, including Woodstock, at which he gave a towering performance, cementing his reputation as one of the biggest voices and most compelling acts around.
Joe Cocker! (1969), which included a turbulent rendition of Leon Russell’s Delta Lady, proved the valedictory outing for the Grease Band, who had become little more than a background to his vocals.
But without a band, and with a touring contract to fulfil, Cocker assembled 21 musicians, wives, hangers-on, managers, roadies, children, a film crew, a spotted dog and a bus driver and set out across the States on the chaotic “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tour, performing 65 concerts in 57 days.
The experience, in addition to the cavalier range of substances Cocker ingested, so exhausted the singer that he was forced to return to Sheffield to recuperate. As the album Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1970) and its accompanying single, Cry Me a River, stormed the American charts, a desolate Cocker was dividing his time between his parents’ house and the pub, lamenting “the three o’clock break – that’s the endless gap between lunchtime and the pub opening again at six o’clock”.
His only appearance, as he wrestled with his demons and life-threatening addictions to whisky and heroin, was a supposedly triumphant homecoming at Sheffield City Hall. But, singing alongside the Mad Dogs veteran Rita Coolidge, his performance merely confirmed that his recuperation remained incomplete, and 1971 passed in a haze. On one occasion he met Princess Anne in a nightclub and, temporarily confused, thought she was his girlfriend. It took a pair of policemen to convince him otherwise.
He found the strength to resuscitate his career after seeing Ray Charles interviewed on television. When Charles was asked: “Who are the greatest living blues singers?” he answered: “Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Joe Cocker.” Inspired, Cocker returned to the stage. He toured America and Europe, but was forced to leave Australia overnight with six of his band members to avoid 18 charges, including assault, having already been fined A$1,200 for drug offences.
Rarely uninfluenced by hard-core addictions, and suffering memory lapses, Cocker relocated to Los Angeles in 1973 and – when he could make it to the studio – continued to enjoy periodic chart success. By now completely incapable of writing his own songs, he remained such an idiosyncratic interpreter of other songwriters’ material that the omission was scarcely relevant.
Despite his “foetal” performance before the press in LA in early 1974, Cocker’s voice ensured that the curtain never quite came down on his career. The tumult in his life may even have helped, both in the increasingly ravaged grandeur of his singing and in attracting songwriters keen to benefit from such a uniquely rough-edged, wounded instrument. If his behaviour tested the patience of his record companies beyond endurance, a series of albums – I Can Stand A Little Rain (1974), Jamaica Say You Will (1975), Stingray (1976), Luxury You Can Afford (1978), Standing Tall (1981) – performed creditably, as did the singles culled from them.
And for all his troubles Cocker retained the affection of his industry. When he sang the Crusaders’ I’m So Glad I’m Still Standing Here Today – a song specifically written for him – at the 1982 Grammy Awards, he received a standing ovation and renewed record company interest. It proved a turning point. Up Where We Belong, his duet with Leonard Cohen’s long-time backing singer Jennifer Warnes, was propelled by the success of the Richard Gere/Debra Winger film An Officer and a Gentleman to become his first American No 1. It also won the Oscar for Best Film Song.
On the back of this success he filled large arenas in the US and Europe, especially Germany, where his popularity had never waned. He enjoyed a triumphant return to Sheffield almost 10 years to the day after his last drug-fuelled appearance there.
Joe Cocker at the London Palladium in 1987 (ITV/REX)
Attracting higher quality songwriters, such as Jeff Lyne and Bryan Adams, he enjoyed greater success. Civilised Man (1984), Cocker (1986), Unchain My Heart (1987), One Night Of Sin (1989), Night Calls (1992), Have a Little Faith (1994) and his last album, Fire It Up (2012), all achieved platinum sales.
He also recorded songs for movies, including You Can Leave Your Hat On for Adrian Lyne’s 9½ Weeks, in which he turned Randy Newman’s sly voyeurism into a tidal wave of restrained lust. The singer observed: “I suddenly made a lot of friends. They kept coming over and wanting to see the director’s cut of Kim Basinger stripping for Mickey Rourke.”
Renewed success brought a relative harmony to the singer’s personal life. Supported by his new wife, Pam, whom he had met at Jane Fonda’s house while he was living in Santa Barbara, he rejected heroin, forsook spirits for beer and, after a long struggle, overcame his nicotine addiction. He rejoiced in less turbulent times and bought a ranch in Colorado that he rechristened the “Mad Dog Ranch”. There he raised animals, grew his own food, opened a café and indulged his passion for fly-fishing.
By now bearded, balding and portly, the singer was one of the music industry’s most celebrated survivors and was accorded the appropriate respect. He released occasional albums of “new” material, regular “greatest hits” and “live” collections and even covered his own covers. Capable of filling Old Trafford, he also performed for the Prince’s Trust and the usual flotilla of charity fundraisers.
These included such occasions as Nelson Mandela’s 70th Birthday Concert, the Concert for Berlin after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the inauguration of President Bush and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. But however civilised the setting, Cocker’s voice remained defiantly and magnificently un-housetrained, and his movements on stage as pained as ever.
He is survived by his wife Pam, whom he married in 1987, and by a stepdaughter. His brother, Victor, was chief executive of Severn Trent.
Joe Cocker, born May 20 1944, died December 22 2014
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