January 21.
When I think back to interesting interviews, if they could possibly be called that, Cocker always comes out near the top of the list.
As in, near the bottom.
Only Lou Reed was more tortuous.
Cocker and Keith Richards used to vie for the top spot in rock music's Who Will Die Next race back in the 1970s.
Cocker was in particularly bad shape when he came to Dunedin in 1977.
Tales from overseas had him performing in a stumbling oyster-eyed trance, throwing up all over the stage, a complete physical wreck of a man.
This entranced the rock media, and his descent was regularly monitored for us all to read.
In those days at the Dunedin Evening Star, I was sent out to meet touring artists' late morning flights.
The photographer and I worked on a very tight schedule, as the story was slated for the front page, and I had no time back at the office to type up the goods.
I usually scrawled the story by hand on a reporter's pad on my thigh as we sped back into the city, to be greeted by a feral "Where-have-you been?" from the sub-editors.
What sometimes made it harder was if the artist refused to be photographed next to the Evening Star Fountain, which tended to be my command from above.
Perfection was getting a totally agreeable rock star, who would go on to praise the fountain and claim he or she had been wanting to come to Dunedin for years.
Cocker was not an Evening Star Fountain kind of guy.
Neither, incidentally, was David Frost.
The Cocker party's flight from Christchurch had been a tempestuous one, and they had been celebrating with some British Lions rugby players all night.
The behaviour of Cocker and legendary keyboardist Nicky Hopkins had been particularly offensive, and complaints were later made to Air New Zealand by a prominent local jeweller.
When they arrived, Cocker was clearly bladdered beyond medical testing, and Hopkins rubber-jellied his way across the tarmac like crumpled laundry.
The norm of grabbing a few coherent sentences as we walked towards the car park quickly proved impossible.
There was nothing else for it, I would have to hitch a ride back to Dunedin in Cocker's car.
Fortunately Michael Lang, the absurdly young entrepreneur who put on the Woodstock Festival with a permanent beam while millions of dollars burned around him, had become Cocker's manager, and he was amenable to anything.
Cocker, however, did not even know I was in the car.
He ensconced himself in the back seat with a giant ghetto blaster on full throttle, listening to the wildly obscene Derek and Clive tape, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's politically oh-so-wrong masterpiece which was possessed by all touring rock bands.
My questions were thoughtfully researched and reasoned, and each Cocker reply was a guffaw at Derek and Clive.
I looked helplessly at Lang.
He beamed back.
Coming into Fairfield, I desperately changed tack and mentioned I ran a record store.
Cocker finally focused on me and asked if I had any Ray Charles.
He even sang snatches of a few songs.
Phew! There were three paragraphs right there, the humble Sheffield plumber who still carries an Olympian torch for Ray Charles, who breaks into the man's music at the curl of an eyebrow.
Then it was back to Derek and Clive.
I returned to the Town Hall later.
Hopkins, whom I dearly wanted to interview at length, had passed out in the foyer, Lang was nowhere to be seen.
Two great interviews for my weekly music column lost forever.
I told my friends the concert could be a train wreck.
But it wasn't.
Cocker was magnificent.
Hopkins, shovelled into the Town Hall by the road crew, played beautifully.
As Chuck Berry sang, you never can tell.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
