Joe Cocker - obituary

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”.

(telegraph.co.uk)