Iconic Joe Cocker Concert Footage Hits YouTube, Remastered In HD
Cocker’s performance of ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’ from the 1970 concert film ‘Mad Dogs & Englishmen’ was recently shared.
On Mad Dogs & Englishmen, Joe Cocker is a force of nature. The live album and concert film captures a young Cocker in his prime, bringing raw swagger to a range of rock and soul classics, many of which were only a few years old at the time of the recording. Now, iconic footage of Cocker performing the Beatles’ “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” has been remastered in HD to commemorate 55 years since the album’s release in August 1970.
In the newly remastered clip, Cocker can be seen howling the then-current Abbey Road track with a barely contained energy that sends his body into jolting contortions. Onstage at New York City’s Fillmore East, he’s backed by an unusually large unit led by musical director Leon Russell, featuring a choir, a horn section, and multiple drummers. Thanks to this new update, director Pierre Adidge’s scenes have never been so vivid.
Mad Dogs & Englishmen arrived on the heels of Cocker’s first two studio albums, 1969’s With a Little Help From My Friends and 1970’s Joe Cocker!, which had established the British singer as one of the most formidable voices of his era. Cocker was emerging as a master interpreter of pre-existing hits, putting a powerful new spin on them with his hearty bellows and roars. That continued on Mad Dogs & Englishmen, which pulled only four tracks from his studio albums in favor of other widely known favorites from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, and more.
The Mad Dogs & Englishmen concert film was released in March 1971, drawing praise from no less than Roger Ebert, who called its performance footage “the best rock coverage since Woodstock” in his Chicago Sun-Times review. “The sound is first rate, for one thing,” Ebert added, “and director Pierre Adidge has some idea of why Cocker electrifies a crowd.” Vincent Canby of The New York Times felt similarly, hailing Mad Dogs & Englishmen as “one of the best concert films so far.”
