PP Arnold: 'Not only have I survived, the music has survived'

Relationships with Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Jimi Hendrix and Steve Marriott of the Small Faces would follow, as would hits such as The First Cut is the Deepest and Angel of the Morning.

In later years she would make an album with Barry Gibb and Eric Clapton that would only see the light of day 47 years later, don roller skates to appear on the West End stage in Starlight Express, and tour the world with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters.

In the 1990s she was rediscovered by dance artists such as The KLF and Altern-8, and fêted by Ocean Colour Scene, whose guitarist Steve Cradock produced her most recent album.

Although now 77, she shows no sign of slowing down, with recent events in Amsterdam and Bilbao. On Friday she’s back in Yorkshire for a gig at the Piece Hall in Halifax that’s been organised by Loafers Records.

The day we speak Arnold has just received a message from Gered Mankowitz, the photographer who has captured many of the best-known images of her in the 1960s. They’re due to do a Q&A together at the Iconic Gallery in Piccadilly, she explains, adding: “We’re just going to talk about our relationship – and it goes all the way back. All the best images of my life he’s taken. He’s my friend, he’s like a brother to me, he’s the only one who I still have a relationship with from that period.”

She does still regularly correspond with Oldham, she says, but wishes he had been in the Netherlands for an event helmed by Charley Records to mark the vinyl reissue of her 60s albums The First Lady of Immediate and Kafunta. “As far as my relationship with them musically, that goes to Andrew, so I was in Amsterdam really wishing that Andrew was there with me to celebrate. Not only have I survived, the music has survived – and that was his vision, he’s the one that put me on the path of being an artist.

“I just loved to sing; Ike and Tina was just a job for me, I got out of an abusive marriage and was able to support my two kids, but it was work, I hadn’t even thought of the industry beyond that, then I came to the UK and my whole life changed.”

She talks affectionately of the late Tina Turner, whom she first met in 1965 after being persuaded by a friend to audition for her backing singers, the Ikettes. “Tina was the answer to a prayer,” she says. “I asked God to show me a way out of the hell that I was in as a young woman in this abusive teen marriage. Tina was the angel that God sent to me to take me out of there, put me on a path that I had never even thought about being on.

“I never planned to sing professionally. I was just trying to be a good girl and graduate from high school and become a legal secretary. Tina was the one that turned my life around, that put the bee in my bonnet that day when I had lied to my husband and went to the rehearsal to help my friends. I just wanted to get back home because I knew I was in trouble, and it was her who said, ‘If you’re in trouble for nothing why don’t you at least come and see the show?’ That was the first time that I had had an experience like that. I was just a young damaged girl. That day when I made that prayer, it took on a life of its own.”

Arnold encountered the Rolling Stones when the Ike and Tina Turner Revue came to London in 1966. She thanks Jagger and Oldham for also putting her on “the path that was obviously my destiny because I’m still doing it after 60 years. Even having gone through the wringer and up and down and all around, I still love it. God gave me a gift to share.”

The pair urged her to escape the notoriously controlling clutches of Ike Turner and remain in London. “I was just going with the flow,” Arnold says now, “and I was blessed for Jimi (Hendrix) to be here at the same time, a soul brother who understood me, someone I could talk to and could be a friend and I could be inspired by what he was doing. Madeleine Bell was also here, she made that choice to leave America, she wanted to get away. I didn’t stay here because I wanted to get away from my family or anything, I just had this opportunity and I embraced it.”

For a time, Arnold and Jagger became lovers before he left her for Marianne Faithfull. The last time they saw each other was at Ian Stewart’s wake in 1984. “I guess we’re good friends,” she says. “We never had a problem with one another, but life took us in different directions.”

Keeping a distance from all the drugs circulating in London’s music scene was a matter of self-preservation, she says. “I had my two kids with me in England, I didn’t have family around me. I had to make decisions, do I go this way? Look what happened to Marianne, and she was English. They left her in the gutter. If I had really got into drugs, who was going to save me?”

A “little incident” with Rod Stewart where she “almost got busted” when police raided their home was salutary enough, she says. “They could’ve kicked me out of the country with my kids, it would’ve be awful.”

At Immediate, Arnold, then 21, forged a bond with Oldham, but after a promising start things ultimately fell apart. “Andrew was around the same age as me; he wasn’t as old as Mick and the Stones. He was young but he was clever and smart and so creative, what a great guy. What a blessing to have that start with him,” she says.

“It was a drag when it all fell apart, but I came into the industry with a very clever, creative manager who had a vision for me. I didn’t even know who I was. Andrew did everything that he said he was going to do and then he couldn’t do it any more because he couldn’t help himself any more at that time.

“The drugs changed everything. I was really angry, like everybody. I was p***ed off with Andrew for years because I put my trust in those guys and when it all fell apart everybody else knew the industry and where to go and try to reconnect. I didn’t hustle to get into the industry; it came to me.”

At the insistence of Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees, Arnold landed a new manager in Robert Stigwood and a deal at Polydor. Between 1969 and 1970 she worked on tracks for a new album ​​​​​​​with Gibb and Eric Clapton, but they remained unreleased for more than four decades until Arnold finally wrestled back control of them in 2017.

“I was in the way as far as Stigwood was concerned because he didn’t want Barry producing me​​​​​​​, that’s why that music got left on the shelf for so long,” she says. “He wanted the brothers to get back together​​​​​​​, and so did I. I loved those guys​​​​​​​. I just caught up in the middle of that family feud business/relationship thing that was going on between Stiggy and Barry.”

She regrets the fact that The Turning Tide was not released for so long. “If that record had been released at the time, it would’ve changed everything that I went through, I wouldn’t have been that lost in the 70s. If I had been projected with the British Invasion of America with the rest of my peers, then that would have been my ticket to the 70s.”

Instead she found herself trying to get another project off the ground with her then partner Fuzzy Samuels, bassist for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. They had a son, but the two weeks after their relationship ended Arnold’s daughter Debbie was tragically killed in a car crash. For a time she withdrew from public life – “I found it very difficult to come back without Debbie,” she says – but in 1983 she was back in the charts with British group The Kane Gang.

The following year she landed a role as Belle the Sleeping Car in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s West End musical Starlight Express (“I lied and told them I could skate,” she confesses).

“I came into the theatre as a result of my vocal ability, I didn’t know anything about acting, but I could be directed,” Arnold adds. “My whole thing is about telling a story. Every song I sing, it’s about telling a story, so it’s like acting. To me, it’s about expression and that story and the diction. You can always tell what I’m singing, you know the lyric because it’s very important to me, and the melody in a song.”

She says that although she considered it “another blessing” to come back to England, she found herself out of place in the US. “My personal experience of growing ​​​​​​​up, and my children growing up, ​​​​​​​was in England​​​​​​​, so even though I remain myself, I never lost my accent, my experience of living was different than if I had grown up in the States. I wouldn’t want to live in America, ever.

“That’s another thing that changed me in the 70s. I was very in touch with what was happening in the civil rights revolution, Angela Davis, I was quite revolutionary. I even took off my wigs and went natural, which was another thing that affected me as PP Arnold because that little girl with the mini skirts and the wigs suddenly was looking more like Cicely Tyson. After my daughter (died), I was very natural. I think I was one of the first artists wearing the braids and the dreadlocks. I had my locks from ’77 because the braids that I buried my daughter in went into locks.”

During the Acid House boom in the late ’80s Arnold had a top 20 hit with The Beatmasters; more followed in the early 1990s with Altern-8 and The KLF – although the latter remains a bone of contention over royalties.

“The KLF situation, that’s not a very happy one, but still that kept my name out there,” she says. “I was that hook for 3AM Eternal, though they still owe me my money. People ask me about that because it’s a great track, but we didn’t connect. I am the Mu Mu Choir, I took Katie Kissoon with me and we tracked all that stuff for them, and the way they did me is not cool.”

Her friendship with Ocean Colour Scene – and in particular their guitarist Steve Cradock – is however, a much happier subject. “We met in 1994, it was when I was doing the musical Once On This Island and we were playing at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and those guys came to the stage door with flowers and introduced themselves and they wanted me to go in the studio with them that night,” she recalls.

“We reconnected when the tribute to the Small Faces album was being done to help Ronnie Laine. That’s when a did a track with Primal Scream. All the Mods were contributing to that. Then (Ocean Colour Scene) brought me to Birmingham to sing on Traveller’s Tune.

“Steve was really instrumental in helping me get back to being the PP Arnold that they all love. Our love of Steve Marriott brought us together. We just clicked, he got me, he helped me remember who I was.”

Next year will see her first career-spanning box set compiled by Demon Records. It will include recordings she made with Chas Jankel of The Blockheads and Dr Robert of The Blow Monkeys, she says, adding: “All the collaborations I’ve done is what allowed me to stay in the loop, even when I wasn’t doing my own solo stuff. I’ve collaborated with a lot of people.” There are even demos she made with her son Kodzo​​​​​​​, who works a musical director for Jess Glynne and Jessie J​​​​​​​.

“My boys are great, I have two wonderful sons,” she says. “We had to go through it, but as my dad used to say, ‘You have to go through it to get to it’.”

Soul Survivor, published by Nine Eight Books, is out in paperback now. PP Arnold plays at the Piece Hall on Friday December 8. https://pparnold.com/home