PP Arnold - Soul Survivor
Union Chapel, London
I didn’t even notice PP Arnold singing on Beatmasters’ Burn It Up, one of 1988’s big bucketfull of UK house tracks released probably every day during that year. There was a desperate cast around back then for female singers who could bring authentic-sounding churchy soul singing to a 4/4 beat and PP Arnold fit the bill, big time, decades after her prime-time in the 1960s.
Amazingly it remains the case that PP, AKA Patricia Ann Cole could still knock out the kind of top-line soulboys dream of right now, in her 78th year. In fact, it’s possible, that her generally neglected lower range is even stronger now she’s older.
Accompanied only by a pianist, who sometimes struggled to keep up, literally, with her energy PP Arnold took us through her entry into singing and then her 1960s, the first half in America, in the second after an interval, in Swinging London.
Let’s get some niggles out of the way - the staging, for whatever reason, was a shame. For such a large and presumably well-appointed venue it seems weird they had to use a classroom projection screen, not much bigger than an average TV. The lighting seemed perfunctory. The sound from the clips shown was poor - even for Youtube rips - and the cueing was often late or at the wrong time. Admittedly, Ms Arnold did let the chatting slide about a bit but it seemed an annoyingly easy to fix bunch of problems.
That said, it was worth coming out just to hear the definitive version of Barry and Robin Gibb’s To Love Somebody - the piano (thankfully) seemed to melt away so that I was left with just the singing to lift me. PP Arnold’s delicate, husky, butterfly dancing performance between two, three blasts of full-voiced desperate, emotional hunger. Magnificent.
At the age most people are struggling to open a tin of cat food PP Arnold is doing the Mashed Potato and the Shag right across the stage
This was an event to promote PP Arnold’s autobiography but it was also an education, not just about the singer, but about life as a young, abused woman, a lonely girl in London surrounded by hairy, lairy pop blokes, a single mum, a Black woman in America and also in the UK - including two different flavours of racism, one (amazingly) courtesy of The Rolling Stones and the other courtesy of the southern states in Jim Crow time.
Songs and snatches of songs were interspersed throughout PP Arnold’s personal history, open and raw, and there were game demonstrations of some of the 60s dances she had to perform with Ike and Tina Turner’s kinetic Ikettes. At the age most people are struggling to open a tin of cat food PP Arnold is doing the Mashed Potato and the Shag right across the stage.
Despite her ebullience, there was a streak of sadness throughout. Running a little over time she had to rush through the ending and, it seemed, one more slight from the venue that the recording of her singing at her daughter’s funeral started up before she had a chance to wrap up properly. Nobody there would have minded another five minutes.
As it was, Ms Arnold was mobbed on the way to the book signing table as she walked through the venue, after a standing ovation that was possibly as much for her actual soul surviving as for her incredible singing on the night.
And it seems only right that our adopted churchy sister from sunny LA should be celebrated in a deconsecrated church in soggy London. It’s the least we owe her.
Essential Information
* After touring with the Rolling Stones, PP Arnold was signed to their manager’s record label, Immediate Records. Coined by Andrew Loog Oldham, the label’s motto was ‘Happy to be a part of the industry of human happiness’.
PP Arnold's Soul Survivor is available here
