A Cut Above The Rest

It began long ago s and worlds apart . . . and then it began again with long ago s and worlds apart. First it was P.P. Arnold singing and recording alongside the Small Faces. Now she s back, guesting with Primal Scream on their version of Understanding , a B-side originally done by the Small Faces (from the days when B-sides were A-sides ), but which has now been rejuvenated for a multi-artist tribute album to the four Mod Gods of permanent cool.
It s one of Bobby Gillespie s more inspired readings too, hyper-charged by P.P. s soaring complementary vocals, her perfect voice working just as powerfully pure against Gillespie s impassioned people believe just what I m putting down as it did when she was recording with Steve Marriott. And then, following a fortuitous link-up at a Small Faces Benefit gig tied in with promotion for the album, she s recording with Maximum British R&B practitioners and Fred Perry shirt-wearers Ocean Colour Scene too . . .!
And it s only appropriate that she should. After all, as she explains to me now: I sang on the original Small Faces hits Tin Soldier and Itchycoo Park . And we all used to tour together with Jimi Hendrix and the Move and the Kinks and all those people. In those days it was like everything was done live, everybody was playing music, we were all on the road.
It was a situation almost recreated when she met up with the Moseley Shoals nouveau-Mods at that fateful Small Faces Tribute gig (which doubled as a benefit for the late Ronnie Lane s MS charity). As well as relentlessy interrogating her about her days with the Faces, the 60 s-fixated (some would say over-fixated) OCS roped her in to add vocal touches to Traveller s Tune for their Marchin Already album. Suddenly, it seems, P.P. Arnold is not only a magificent vocalist in her own right, but a live icon of at least two of Pop s great lost Golden Eras.
So, from the unique perspective of total involvement in three decades of vastly changing musical style, just how valid, does she think, are the similarities between the Sixties Club Scene and its much-hyped Ninties counterparts, Britpop, Rave and life beyond?
Oooo, well, she says, taking a deliciously deep breath. It does relate in the sense that those kids now are actually trying to recreate a vibe that happened then. They re into, like, dressing up in 60s clothes and the psychedelic thing. They re into that dressing up part of it. But I don t think that it relates to what was happening in the 60s, other than the connection that people keep trying to put on it which is the drug scene, right? People took LSD in the 60s, and all that. But as long as I ve known and been involved in life and living and I grew up in the ghetto there s always a drug scene happening. And I just hope that the kids don t get sucked into it on that level, y know? Into taking acid and all that other stuff. That is not a good thing at all.
People forget that the 60s era was also a bit more serious, even though everybody seems to think it was all wild and free with everybody freaking out and everything. But there was a lot of serious revolutionary things going on too. It was a very revolutionary time. Now they re into the clothes, and they re into trying to recreate the atmosphere. But that s the only way it relates . . .
Long ago s and worlds apart . . . P.P. Pat Arnold has a career CV that s like every vinyl trainspotter s wildest fantasy. Dip into it at random at any point and there are unbelievable riches.
I was born in the ghetto, a little ghetto called Watts on the outskirts of Hollywood, she begins, laughing in perfect pitch. My whole family are Gospel Singers. I come from a family of Gospel Singers. My mother, father and grandmother, we were the full Gospel Baptist Church Choir! It just seems like my family always sang together, and we were always in harmony. That s the way god planned it, and it s special.
From there, it was to be the less harmonious vibes of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue which provided Pat with the bridge to Swinging Sixties London. She d quit the typing pool to become one of Ike Turner s Ikettes in time to contribute to the legendary River Deep Mountain High sessions.
Ike produced one side of that album, and Phil Spector produced the other side. And so, yeah that s the part of being with Ike & Tina that I was really involved in, we did stuff with Phil Spector with the big choirs. And then, of course, we did all the Ikettes stuff on all the funkier material that was on the other side.
These are events powerfully recreated in the movie What s Love Got To Do With It. The high-pressure atmosphere of Ike Turner s regime fuelled by drugs-and-violence, then further compounded by Spector s paranoid genius. But P.P. Arnold soon found herself in London doing session-work for Spector s grooviest British disciple Andrew Loog Oldham, the original Sunglasses-After-Dark hipster. A European Turner tour with the Rolling Stones had resulted in a word from Mick Jagger to his then-manager, and she was invited to become part of Oldham s Immediate label roster.
Immediate was one of the first idependent labels, and the whole scene was modelled on the Phil Spector California scene, she recalls. But then there was the other side of it, which was the funky side, with people like Steve Marriott, the Faces, and myself. We were all into the Motown and Stax vibe, and we were trying to recreate that part of what was happening in the States, and doing it over here in England.
She scored hits in her own right the Cat Stevens song The First Cut Is The Deepest , followed by Angel Of The Morning while touring with a backing group called the Nice which at times included musicians like Keith Emerson (ELP) and Steve Howe (Yes), and she also found time to work on sessions for label-mates Chris Farlowe and the Small Faces.
Yeah, all that seems like it was another world now, she reflects. We would go out on those Immediate tours, so all the artists were very much in tune and in touch with each other, and with all the people who were about at the time. We all used to tour together. We used to work up and down the M1.
And we used to go to Europe. I remember touring in Europe doing all the colour TV shows when colour TV was first happening. There were all those Music Shows and Festivals and things. It was a special time. But unfortunately that all changed when Immediate suddenly went bankrupt, and everybody just disappeared with the money and we all got left behind. I guess it was a drag, all that, cos there was, like, really good things happening there.
Then came stage work, with roles in Jack Good s Catch My Soul, Lloyd-Weber s Jesus Christ, Superstar, And Starlight Express the latter, a part for which she had to endure a two-week crash-course in roller-skating. It was an uneasy period.
I m not a very theatrical person, she confides. I learnt a lot from those experiences in the theatre. I learnt a lot from the discipline that has to go down with, say, Catch My Soul. But I get very bored very easily in the Theatre, especially if it s a show that s just sort of set. They want you to do everything the same way every single night. It s not a harmonious vibration for me because my whole thing is, like, energy. Especially where music is concerned, I relate to what s happening at the moment. I never sing a song exactly the same way. I m a Gospel Singer, and that s all about ad-libbing.

You might not realise it, but you saw and heard a lot of P.P. Arnold between then and now. You heard her singing harmonies and call-and-response on Peter Gabriel s So album. She did work for the satiric Comic Strip TV movie Supergrass ( I did the theme song for that with Simon Booth and the guys from Working Week ). She was perfectly cast as a deliciously observed Jazz singer guesting in Jill Gasgoine s Night Club for Boon s Christmas Special alongside Michael Elphinck s downbeat private investigator. And you probably heard her singing a Boy George composition on the Electric Dreams movie soundtrack too, alongside Philip Oakey and Heaven 17.
There s more, including TV-ad voice-overs for Finesse shampoo, Vortex bleach, and Levi s, but the route back into the Top 20 in her own right came initially through Martin Heath s Rhythm King Records home of Bomb The Bass, the hypnotically inane Baby Ford, and S*Express (whose Mark Moore gets a liner-credit on the Burn It Up sleeve).
The Beatmasters, you ll no doubt recall, roared in on House Music s first wave with the frenetic Rock Da House recorded in liason with ace rappers the Cookie Crew, making Rhythm King with Sheffield s Fon organisation leaders of the UK chart strike force for House product.
I d met Richard Walmsley two years before, P.P. Arnold explains. I was looking for someone to write with. And so was he. We hooked up and soon we were writing lots of different things. The Beatmasters were very much into House Music, so Richard thought it might be a good idea for us to do a House tune together. I said to him as long as we can make it funky, then I can kinda relate to it, and get into it , because I didn t know very much about House music at that time. I wasn t really tuned into all that stuff that originally came out of Chicago and Detroit, all the roots of what House Music was about. I hadn t really been tuned into that, so I was educated by the Beatmasters!
She arrived back on TV with a video hyper-charged with blazing sihouettes and a hit that sounds as new as tomorrow s Ceefax even now. And I guess I was very much in love with what I saw. The single Burn It Up , recorded in league with the upwardly mobile Beatmasters, took her to no.14 in September 1988, and back onto Top Of The Pops after a twenty-year absence.
It was great to see that, she says, laughing infectiously. I was a nervous wreck before Burn It Up went into the Top 40. You work so hard on a project that it s great when it breaks through. Because otherwise people just think you don t exist anymore.
There were more Beatmaster collaborations, including the lushly expansive sweep of Make Me Feel on their album, while her other avenues into Techno and Rave scored even higher chart placings than she d achieved in the 1960 s. It opened the door for Dreaming - a New Musical Express Single Of The week just nine months later, recorded with Pressure Point. And then she scored her biggest chart smash to date with Evapor-8 , recorded with Mark Archer and Chris Peat s Techno group Altern-8, which reached no.6 in April 1992.
From work with Hendrix or Nick Drake, and singles produced for her by Mick Jagger or Barry & Maurice BeeGee, to working with the Techno furnace of Altern-8, through to Primal Screamers Bobby Gillespie and ex-Stone Roses drummer Mani. From River Deep Mountain High through Evapor-8 into high-energy duetting with Simon Fowler s Ocean Colour Scene, P.P. Arnold, the one-time First Lady of Immediate , can take a unique perspective from total involvement in three decades of vastly changing music style. Which her Small Faces then-and-now involvement with the Long Ago s And Worlds Apart tribute album brings neatly full circle. And she still looks as good.
I put a lot of energy into working, y know? And there s lots of things that you haven t heard yet, she says. There s lots of great things we ve got. All the time I ve been writing, and I ve got lots of tunes. I ve been living it and writing it. So I just thank god that finally a channel has opened which will hopefully make it possible for all those things to come through and be heard.
From long ago s and worlds aparts, to here today . . . first cuts are still the deepest. n