Radio Gonzo

Last week, along with most of the musical publications in the western world, we bade our farewells to Joe Cocker. He was undoubtedly a giant of the musical genre with which we are dealing in this magazine, but to leave it at an obituary culled from Wikipedia didn't sit well with me. Then, the other night I was pootling about the Internet on my iPad, which is something I tend to do quite a lot these days as I am now free to surf the net from the comfort of my armchair, rather than from the relative austerity of my office. I was reading David Hepworth's blog when I came across this post from the shortest day of last year: "I got a few calls this evening to talk about Joe Cocker. I don't really have anything pat I wanted to say and I wouldn't have had time to do any revision so I passed. I just heard the BBC's Arts Correspondent on the 9 o'clock bulletin on Five Live. He said something like "Of course, Joe broke through with that amazing version of 'With A Little Help From My Friends' at Woodstock in 1968 an