Singer Joe Cocker dies aged 70

Blues rock legend Joe Cocker has died after a battle with lung cancer. He was 70.

Cocker was best known for his cover of the Beatles' With A Little Help From My Friends. He performed the song live at Woodstock in 1969.

His other hits included You Are So Beautiful in 1975 and Up Where We Belong in 1983, a duet with Jennifer Warnes which won a Grammy.

A long-time US resident, he died at home in Colorado.

Sony Music released a statement, confirming Cocker's death.

It said: 'John Robert Cocker, known to family, friends, his community and fans around the world as Joe Cocker, passed away on December 22, 2014 after a hard fought battle with small cell lung cancer."

Cocker was born in Sheffield and by 1961 was living a double life, working as a gas fitter by day and transforming himself into a club singer at night.

He made his name as an interpreter of other people's songs.

For a brief period in the late 70s, he tried writing his own material but it is his definitive versions of Jimmy Webb's The Moon's A Harsh Mistress, Leon Russell's Delta Lady, numerous Beatles songs, Billy Preston's You Are So Beautiful, Jimmy Cliff's Many Rivers To Cross and a dozen others for which he was known.

"Because of my vocal style I don't try and reinvent them. Even if the arrangement isn't that far removed from the original I try to bend them around in a certain way that gives them a new approach," he told the Herald in 2005.

Cocker was a frequent visitor to New Zealand in recent years, last playing at Vector Arena in 2011.



- NZ Herald