Story of the Song: With a Little Help from my Friends by The Beatles

The “Ringo track” was a necessary fan-pleasing component of Beatles’ albums. For Sgt Pepper, Paul McCartney and John Lennon gave their drummer a grown-up children’s song to get his flat vowels around. McCartney claims “With a Little Help From My Friends” started life at Lennon’s house in Weybridge, under the working title “Bad Finger Boogie”. One writing session, however, was witnessed by the band’s biographer, Hunter Davies, at Macca’s London home.

“Whenever they got stuck, they would go back and do a rock’n’roll song or an Engelbert Humperdinck song and just bugger around,” Davies wrote. Lennon contributed the line “What do I see when I turn out the light?” and, as it was 1967, McCartney managed a drug reference, “I get high, with a little help”.

Ringo learnt his lines in the studio, refusing to sing just one couplet, “What would you do if I sang out of tune? / Would you stand up and throw a tomato at me?” McCartney sensibly gave it an on-spot rewrite, to “Would you stand up and walk out on me?”

A year later, Joe Cocker was on the toilet in the backyard of his Sheffield home humming the track when he had the eureka moment that gave him his career break. But instead of walking-blues, Cocker was thinking in 3/4 time. At rehearsals he asked his group, the Grease Band, to play the song as a waltz, telling his organist, Tommy Eyre, to “change the chords in the verse to make it more classical”.

For the Olympic studios session, the soon-to-be Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and the drummer B J Wilson were drafted in. After 13 takes, they’d nailed it.

Ringo’s likeable singalong was transformed with spasms of fist-clentching soul. The Beatles loved it and sent Cocker a telegram, reading: “Thanks – you are far too much”. Subsequent covers followed, notably a Nineties take by popsters Wet Wet Wet. “It’s been picked up and used a lot, that song,” said McCartney. “I think that was probably the best of the songs we wrote for Ringo, actually.”