Joe Cocker has a little help from his friends

Source: The Courier-Mail

But a reconnection was made in Los Angeles through an acquaintance of Parker's, Matt Serletic, a hitmaker himself in Collective Soul.

Serletic was producing Cocker's latest album, Hard Knocks, and asked Parker to play on the sessions.

"I think their kids go to school together," Cocker says in that quiet voice of his, still plenty of Sheffield in the accent even after many years living in the US.

"It was funny. Ray came in the studio and he said, 'I remember you, Joe, you were always laying down'." Cocker gives his soft chuckle. "I said, 'I won't be doing any more of that, Ray, I assure you'."

Hard Knocks. He certainly got that right. But those troubled times, when Cocker grabbed headlines of the "Deport Cocker!" variety on that ill-starred Australian tour in 1972, are long, long ago.

These days, Cocker and wife Pam live in small-town Crawford, Colorado, where he likes to check the greenhouse vegetables, take walks in the mountain foothills or go fly-fishing in the Gunnison River.

Then there is the Cocker Kids Foundation, an organisation that has raised more than $700,000 to help young people in the local community, everything from music camps to education scholarships and hosting Christmas parties.

Crawford has given plenty to Cocker, an escape from the pressures of showbiz life, and he's glad to give something back.

Just as in the days 50 years ago when he started playing around Sheffield in his band The Cavaliers, Cocker is just happy to have a gig. At 66, he's singing well, and touring and recording.

During the making of  Hard Knocks, Cocker had what he describes as "a small stroke in my eye".

"I forget sometimes how much I put into it when I get caught up in a tune," Cocker says. No one who has ever seen him perform is in any doubt of that, revealed in the gritty rasp of his voice and the gesticulations with his arms as he emphasises the emotion of the song.

Cocker has never played an instrument, unusual in one so musical as he is, but the way he moves his body  much toned down compared with his more youthful self  was his way of approximating the feeling of playing an instrument.

But not playing an instrument himself always meant Cocker had a fantastic ear for gathering the right musicians around him, from the days in the 1960s when the great pianist Chris Stainton was behind him in The Grease Band, through to Leon Russell as his musical director on the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour and album, and now with his long-serving band.

Maybe that work ethic goes back to the days as a Sheffield teenager, working as an apprentice gasfitter by day and after hours as the singer in Vance Arnold and the Avengers, belting out Ray Charles covers. In 1963, they even supported the Rolling Stones at Sheffield City Hall.

Cocker, like the Stones and hundreds of other British musicians who would become the next generation of rock greats, from Eric Clapton to Jimmy Page, Mick Fleetwood and Eric Burdon, was getting the musical education no university course could ever provide.

"I played at a little club in Sheffield and we would get to hear all the blues guys, Jimmy Reed, Memphis Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson, seeing them play and being backstage with them left a huge impression. I saw all the rockers come through too, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran."

And then came the voice that changed his life, Ray Charles. "I had heard What'd I Say, that must have come out in '59, and I thought it was just another one of those one-off rock hits. A bit later I flipped a record over and I heard I Believe to My Soul, and all of a sudden all the other guys I was interested in, I threw them out the window.

"I had a cousin who said, 'We thought you had lost your mind when Ray Charles came along'. " Not his mind but his heart. Charles became and remains the foundation on which Cocker's career rests.

"I was studying everything he did intensely, and he did that to a lot of other singers too. He woke us all up to the fact that you could connect the world of gospel and blues, which nobody had really dared to do much before that.

"There is something about that music. I've never been a writer, never written anything I was happy with. At heart connecting emotions to the audience is what I'm all about."

The world got to know about that with his breakthrough hit, a version of The Beatles'  With a Little Help From My Friends, which had appeared the year before on the Sgt Pepper album. It is one of the few recordings of a Beatles' song that matches the original, and made him a worldwide star with a gut-wrenchingly soulful performance at the Woodstock festival in 1969.

"I had already recorded Bye Bye Blackbird, the old standard, and I liked the idea of doing another song that people would instantly recognise. I was sitting on an outside toilet in Sheffield with my trousers around my knees and the concept for the whole thing came to me, doing it in a slow three-four, how to do the chorus.

"We originally recorded it with Stevie Winwood and Jim Capaldi, but everyone got so excited about it that we had to go back in a bit later and re-cut the whole thing."

Hard Knocks is something different for Cocker, one of the great interpreters of songs from the classic soul and rock 'n' roll songbooks. But this album aims for a more contemporary feel, mostly featuring new material especially written for him, some of it by Serletic himself.

"I liked working with Matt because I knew he'd be modern without going overboard with the approach."

What does a vocal perfectionist like Cocker make of pop music today, where many singers are treated with Autotune and no one blinks at using the pitch-correction software to fix the  "performance".

"It scares the hell out of me that that is where they will point me next," Cocker says. "Then again, whenever I say something will never happen . . . but God forbid. It's a bit much, isn't it?"

Joe Cocker plays Cairns Convention Centre, Tuesday; Townsville Entertainment Centre, Wednesday; Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Friday.  Hard Knocks (Sony) out now.