{"id":165096,"date":"2025-09-28T02:50:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T02:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/165096\/"},"modified":"2025-09-28T02:50:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T02:50:08","slug":"joe-cocker-and-the-with-a-little-help-from-my-friends-supergroup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/165096\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Cocker and the ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ supergroup"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Joe<\/p>\n

(Credits: Alamy)<\/p>\n

Sun 28 September 2025 2:00, UK <\/p>\n

It\u2019s one thing to simply churn out a cover version of a song and claim you\u2019ve \u2018made it your own\u2019; entirely another to take an iconic tune and totally reinvent it. That certainly takes some nerves of steel, but it\u2019s something that Joe Cocker<\/a> possessed by the bucketload.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In many ways, if you were a British artist trying to make it big at any point in the late 1960s or even much further on, everything you did was always going to be in the shadow of The Beatles. Whether they intended to be or not, they were the four dark shadows that sent everyone else quivering in the music industry, because they simply knew that they paled in comparison. The smartness of Cocker, however, was that he decided to take that by the horns<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, anyone who was anyone would gladly drop down in awe of The Beatles, back then and very much even still now. But it\u2019s a highly different matter to play them at their own game, yet with his own version of \u2018With a Little Help from My Friends\u2019, and that\u2019s exactly what Cocker managed. Putting that as the lead track, and indeed title, to his debut album was a brave move, but he ultimately only could have done so by completely reinventing the wheel.<\/p>\n

Breathing a fresh sense of imagination into the track by giving it a whole soul makeover, the track became a stormer of a hit that shot straight to number one in the UK, with even Paul McCartney saying, \u201cIt was just mind blowing<\/a>, [Cocker] totally turned the song into a soul anthem and I was forever grateful for him for doing that\u201d. Even though the main man rightly gets all the credit, he did have a little help from a few of his own friends on the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Enlisting the talents of BJ Wilson from Procol Harum on the drums, Led Zeppelin\u2019s Jimmy Page on some of the guitar lines, and the prolific session musician Tommy Eyre playing on the organ, Cocker\u2019s version of \u2018With a Little Help from My Friends\u2019 was essentially a self-made supergroup before the term was even coined. Really, it was in equal parts both an homage and a challenge to The Beatles, to show how stretching the boundaries could really be done.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s good reason that Cocker\u2019s tune is often widely considered as one of the greatest cover songs of all time, not least for the fact that it gathered the attention and acclaim of the original Fabs themselves. It just proved that with a little bit of spark, creativity, and a few talented mates, you could take on anything and make it your own, even the rock titans of the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you were to think about bands who took the spirit of innovation by the reins in the wake of The Beatles, Procol Harum and Led Zeppelin would definitely be right up there. In this sense, it was poetic that Cocker realised the talents of their starlets from the earliest point and used them to his advantage, because it scored him his greatest hit. If you can\u2019t beat them, join them, or in Cocker\u2019s case, do it better.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n

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Straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Alamy) Sun 28 September 2025 2:00, UK It\u2019s one thing to simply churn out a cover version…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,57087,10866,128,64854,10447,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-165096","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-joe-cocker","10":"tag-led-zeppelin","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-procol-harum","13":"tag-the-beatles","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}