Joe Cocker

The gas fitter from Sheffield with one of the great voices of the century, and almost none of the songs. John Robert Cocker was born in Crookes on May 20, 1944, played Sheffield pubs through the early sixties under the stage name Vance Arnold, and kept the day job. With the Grease Band he rebuilt the Beatles' With a Little Help from My Friends as a slow, three-quarter-time gospel wail, and it went to No. 1 in Britain in 1968. He performed it at Woodstock the following year, arms working the air like a man conducting something only he could hear, and the film made him internationally famous almost overnight.

The Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour of 1970, assembled at speed by Leon Russell, produced a live album and a movie and nearly finished him; the seventies that followed were rough. His 1974 recording of You Are So Beautiful reached No. 5 in America and became the song people asked for. Then Up Where We Belong, the duet with Jennifer Warnes from An Officer and a Gentleman, went to No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 1982, won a Grammy, and reset the second half of his career. Unchain My Heart followed in 1987 and the touring never really stopped. Twenty-two studio albums across forty-three years, almost all of them built on other writers' songs and none of them sounding like anybody else. He was appointed OBE in 2007 and died of lung cancer on December 22, 2014, at his home in Crawford, Colorado, aged 70. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him posthumously in 2025.