From the depths of addiction to OBE
With a Little Help from My Friends.
It was his performance of that song that was the defining moment of his Woodstock set.
John Robert Cocker was born in the spring of 1944 into a working-class Sheffield family. He soon became known as Joe, either from a name he was given in a game of cowboys and Indians or after a local window-cleaner.
Aged 12, he was playing in his older brother’s skiffle group and in 1959 formed his own group in which he sang and played drums. By 1961 he had adopted the name Vance Arnold and was leading a group called the Avengers. He soon gave up drumming to concentrate on singing; playing gigs six nights a week and working as a gas fitter was already a punishing enough schedule.
After supporting the Rolling Stones in 1964, the Avengers earned an audition with Decca, although the label was really only interested in ‘‘Vance Arnold’’ and only Cocker was invited to the recording studio. His first single was a cover of the Beatles’ I’ll Cry Instead. It failed to chart and he received just 10 shillings (50 pence) in royalties. By mid-1965 he was back in Sheffield working in a
visitor to New Zealand during newspaper distribution warehouse.
Disillusioned, he gave up singing but returned to the stage in 1967 with the Grease Band. The producer Denny Cordell signed him to EMI and while Cocker was establishing a reputation on the club circuit, Cordell was busily recording material with him, including With a Little Help from my Friends. By November 1968 it was sitting on top of the British charts.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney were impressed and sent him a congratulatory telegram. Later he met the Beatles – ‘‘like an audience with royalty’’ – who played him two new songs, Something and She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, allowing him to record them before they had released them. The pianist Leon Russell wrote his next hit, Delta Lady, and supervised the recording of his second album, Joe Cocker!, which put him into the American Top Ten for the first time.
Yet he was growing disaffected