Soul Survivor PP Arnold - from Ikette to Ocean Colour Scene, and coming to Portsmouth

After a career that has already spanned more than 60 years, the soul singer is still going strong – and is heading to Portsmouth this weekend to play at The Wedgewood Rooms.

Since starting out in 1965 as one of Ike and Tina Turner’s backing singers, The Ikettes, she’s found solo fame with classics like First Cut is The Deepest and Angel of The Morning, a career revival in the mid-1980s via roller-skating musical Starlight Express, enduring popularity as a Mod favourite, and a dizzying amount of collaborations.

But besides those heights there have also been terrible lows – the death of her daughter in a car crash and seeing her career fall apart in the 1970s.

And as she tells The News: “I've been really blessed to be able to still be working as much as I do – I'm out here. There's not many female artists still out here from my time!”

Last year was a busy one for the vocalist – there was a Japanese tour, dates at Glastonbury and numerous other festivals and plenty more live dates.

However, Arnold knows how different things could have been. Looking back at the dawn of her career, she recalls how she found herself in LA, a mother at 16 and married to an older man in an abusive relationship.

"I wasn't sexually active or anything like that,” she says. “I was an honour roll student, just started high school, really excited, but I was infatuated by this guy.

“I was groomed, and I became pregnant at 15. That was my teenage years. Back in those days, there wasn't any kind of support for young girls.

"My family was a strict Baptist family, my father was very, very strict so I was forced to get married to somebody who I didn't even really know.”

It was statutory rape, but the teenage Arnold did as she was told and entered an abusive marriage.

Singing as a career couldn’t have been further from her mind when an opportunity appeared.

"My whole entry into the entertainment business was just an answer to a prayer. I grew up singing in church. I've always sang – I was born into a family of gospel singers.

"In those days, I was an embarrassment to my family, so I wasn't forced to go to church or anything like that.

"At 17, I had two children, I worked two jobs. One Sunday morning, I was doing my laundry and getting myself ready for the my work week.

"I was reminiscing about how Sunday morning used to be about going to church and singing in the choir with my family. And I just sort of said a prayer – I asked God to show me a way out.

“It was a situation that I brought on to myself for being stupid, really – naive, I guess would be a better word.

"Two hours later, I get a phone call from a girl who was an ex-girlfriend of my brother's, Maxine Smith."

Maxine was friends with singer Gloria Scott, who was already an Ikette. But there were two teams of Ikettes, the team with the Revue, and another set who went out with The Dick Clark Show.

“Gloria sang in this B group,” recalls Arnold, “but she knew that the girls from The Revue were leaving and she wanted that gig.

"She knew Maxine – they had this audition to be Ikettes, and the girl that was supposed to go with them didn't show up. So Maxine called me out of desperation, they needed anybody to go with them to help them get the gig.

"I told her I couldn't go – there's no way my husband would let me go. And they go: ‘Tell him anything. We're coming to get you.’ Bam. They hung up the phone, and then they showed up.

"I lied and told my husband I was going to the shops. And then I was in Tina's living room singing, Dancing in The Streets. And so Tina goes, ‘hey, girls, you got the gig’.”

Arnold told them she couldn’t accept because of her husband, who would likely beat her when she got home.

“And then Tina goes, ‘Well, if you're going to get a kick for nothing, you might as well ride up to Fresno with us and at least see the show’.

“There I am with this goddess, Tina Turner, I'm under her spell. I'm a young girl.

"I never got a chance to do anything. I had just messed up my whole teenage years, and this was an opportunity.”

She took the 300 mile trip to Fresno to watch The Ike and Tina Turner Revue, and eventually returned home at 6am the following morning.

"As soon as I walk in the door, it's like, bam, I got it. It was it was as if he knocked some sense into me because I remembered my prayer and I believe that God was showing me a way out. That day changed my whole life.”

She left her husband, put her children in the care of her parents and joined the Revue.

After a two year stint in The Ikettes she moved to Britain with encouragement from The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, after becoming friendly with The Stones while they were all on tour together. Jagger helped her get a solo contract with Immediate Records, a label founded by Stones then-manager Andrew Loog Oldham. Her 1968 debut album, The First Lady of Immediate featured her signature song – The First Cut Is The Deepest.

It was in the UK that she fell in with label mates Small Faces, and particularly their frontman Steve Marriott, which proved to be a defining point in her career.

"That was like, wow, another opportunity knocks situation! But I came here, I never had an ambition to be in the music industry at all,” she recalls. “And I certainly never had an ambition to be a solo artist. I was very, very shy and introverted.”

She now considers herself a British artist who just happens to be American, but for a black teenager coming to the UK was a stark contrast to The States.

"Coming to England, it was like teenage... wow! The whole youth revolution was going on. It was the swinging ’60s, everything was integrated, there we were on tour with the Rolling Stones and Jeff Beck.

"In The States we never worked with white bands. We didn't have mixed tours, we worked the Chitlin’ Circuit – that's where all the jazz, blues, R&B, soul artists played.

“Even if we worked a hotel that was a white hotel or something like that, we had to come in the back, and we couldn't stay in those hotels.

"I did get exploited a lot over here too, but it was a different kind of thing – everybody got ripped off in the ’60s anyway,” she says with a laugh and a shrug.

In the early ’70s she started a relationship with bassist Fuzzy Samuels of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the pair returned to LA, which Arnold describes as her “biggest mistake”. The pair split and just a fortnight later her daughter Debbie died in a car crash.

After this the singer withdrew from public life for several years.

A cover version of the Staple Singers’ Respect Yourself with the Kane Gang in 1983 returned Arnold to the charts.

But it was another strange turn the following year which really got her working again – a role in a new musical about trains, performed entirely on roller skates – Starlight Express. It turned out to be a huge hit.

“I came back on roller skates” she chuckles. “I was Belle, the sleeping car – I was one of the lead female roles, I am the original Belle.

“Belle is no longer in the show – but she was a big character in the original. I was with Stephanie Lawrence and Frances Ruffelle – we were the female leads in that show, and they got rid of us after the first year, because they didn't want to pay us. All of the female principals were sacked.

"But Starlight Express was good for me, and I had come back. People were glad, I'm so naive, I thought that everybody had forgot about me!

“I've been away for about five years – you know, out of sight, out of mind, but as soon as I came back, I started doing different projects and I was getting these offers.”

By the end of the decade and into the ’90s she was featuring on songs by dance acts such as The Beatmasters, The KLF and Atern8.

She also worked on Peter Gabriel’s hit So album and its hit single Sledgehammer, worked and toured extensively with Roger Waters, and forged a close working relationship with Ocean Colour Scene. That band’s Steve Cradock produced her 2019 opus The New Adventures of...P. P. Arnold.

As the range of her musical sparring partners demonstrates, Arnold isn’t afraid of trying something new, but as she puts it: “Nobody really knew what to do with me! That's kind of still the problem – people don't know what to do with me.

"But the universe is always coming in and just presenting me with situations that keep me going.

“I collaborate with a lot of different people – the collaboration is what's helped keep my career going all this time.”

Last year marked Arnold’s 60th anniversary in the industry since she joined The Ikettes, and she is working on a new album which was meant to mark that landmark date, but will now be a little late.

“I've been working on an album, my 60th anniversary album, with some really, really, really, really great people.

"I can't really speak on it yet because I don't like to speak on things until they're done. I'm going to be doing some duets with... nice people.”

And unlike others her age who are still performing – she’s 79 – her voice is still strong, and she’s proud of that.

"I never want to sound old – that's my instrument. I don't want anyone to come to a PP Arnold concert and say that she wasn't on point vocally.”

She remains aware too that it’s her fans who have helped maintain this wild ride: “I have such beautiful, loyal fans that have supported me through the years and that's how I keep going.”

And she’s not about to stop now.

“I don't want to be sitting at home watching TV,” she adds with a wicked laugh.

PP Arnold is at The Wedgewood Rooms in Southsea on Saturday, January 24, doors 7pm, supported by The Racketeers with the Hipshaker DJs. Tickets £28.

Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.