Joe Cocker

Born: May 20, 1944;

Died December 22, 2014.

Joe Cocker, who has died of lung cancer aged 70, was one of the most distinctive sights and sounds in popular music. A singer whose roar was first noticed by his dad when he was just six years old, Cocker went from being a gas-fitter and then working in a newspaper distributer's warehouse in Sheffield to conquering the world after he converted the Beatles' jolly With a Little Help from My Friends into a volcanic soul anthem.

The idea for this life-changing recording had come as Cocker sat in the outside toilet of his parents' house in the Sheffield suburb of Crookes, the same house that would become Cocker's refuge when stardom and the music industry got too much for him. It was also the house he' woudl call regularly from the road to keep in touch, only for his father to say "never heard of you" when Cocker said, "Hi, dad, it's Joe."

To his father, Joe was always John Robert Cocker. He got the name Joe from his pals, either through playing cowboys and them calling him Cowboy Joe or because he and his childhood friend John Mitchell used to mimic an eccentric local window cleaner called Joe. Either way, Joe stuck.

Cocker's grandfather had been a good amateur singer and although his father never performed, he sang along to Mario Lanza records at home and Joe inherited their talent. Music in fact became all-consuming for Joe. He used to carry a transistor radio around all the time and had a tape recorder before such things became everyday items, spending hours capturing his Elvis Presley impersonations.

Skiffle king Lonnie Donegan, as with just about every musician of Cocker's generation, was his first hero and Donegan's appropriations of blues songs led Cocker to Big Bill Broonzy, whom he saw in Sheffield in 1957. From the blues and singing with his brother, Vic's skiffle band aged 12, Cocker moved on to rock 'n' roll and his biggest influence, Ray Charles.

School did not have much to offer the music-mad Cocker and he was expelled for non-attendance at 16. He took a job with the Gas Board but the six gigs a week he was playing, at first as both singer and drummer, with Vance Arnold and the Avengers, were his reason for living.

With a Little Help from My Friends was not the first Beatles song Cocker recorded. In 1964 he released a single of John Lennon's I'll Cry Instead, with Jimmy Page, who coincidentally also put his stamp on Friends, on guitar. Despite a typically committed Cocker reading, it flopped. Another bid for success followed when Cocker moved to London in 1966. He lasted a week, returned to Sheffield and did not play another gig for a year.

When Chris Stainton arrived to play bass guitar with Cocker's next enterprise, the Grease Band, things took a decidedly upward turn. Stainton could play almost any instrument and when Cocker sang ideas to him, he arranged them into songs on keyboards. A demo tape they made found its way to producer Denny Cordell and Cocker's first hit, Marjorine, followed. With a Little Help from My Friends took dozens of takes, with Cocker giving it his all on every one, before Cordell got what he was after. Released in 1968, it became Cocker's theme song.

He sang it at Woodstock the following year and his career in America went into overdrive, with the mammoth soul revue Mad Dogs and Englishmen taking Cocker into the realms of private jets and all the other paraphernalia of stardom. Drink and drugs took their toll but Cocker, with his soulful roar and movements that began as a kind of air guitar mannerism to help him get over his nerves, could generally deliver. The Boxtops' The Letter, Julie London's Cry Me a River, and Mad Dogs colleague Leon Russell's Delta Lady got the Cocker treatment and gave him hits across the world, including Australia where, in 1972, Cocker and some of his entourage were arrested for drug possession in an incident that was blown out of proportion apparently to deflect interest from the government's performance.

Ironically, Cocker's recording of Unchain My Heart was used 28 years later in another Australian politician's election campaign. By this time he had won a Grammy and an Oscar for his Up Where We Belong duet with Jennifer Warnes from the soundtrack to the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman. He was also awarded an OBE in 2011 for his contribution to music and given a possibly even bigger accolade in his own eyes in 1987, when Lonnie Donegan described Cocker as "the best white blues singer in the world".

Fans around the world, including his peers such as Sir Paul McCartney and Billy Joel, agreed and despite keeping up steady rather than spectacular record sales into his later years, Cocker retained a loyal following, especially in Germany where he continued to draw huge audiences.

He is survived by his wife, Pam, and step-daughter, Zoey.

ROB ADAMS