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Mick, Rod, Ike and Me: the brutally honest confessions of PP Arnold

PP Arnold reveals she was naïve about the music industry - Gered Mankowitz
PP Arnold reveals she was naïve about the music industry - Gered Mankowitz

“You know what?” says PP Arnold. “When I decided to write my book my inspiration was Maya Angelou. It’s like, if I’m going to write my book I’m going to tell the truth.”

Over the phone from her rental home in south London, her voice is deep and smoky despite a cold she’s trying to shake off before her first Glastonbury solo show in four days time. That show ended up going down a treat, with Arnold’s voice as rich as ever while performing songs from 2019’s The New Adventures Of... PP Arnold, peppered by a selection of juicy anecdotes she teased from her upcoming memoir, Soul Survivor. The memoir is a sizzler.

Arnold, now 75, was an Ikette from South Central LA who defected aged 19 from Ike and Tina Turner’s UK roadshow to work and sometimes sleep with nearly everyone who was anyone in London’s Swinging Sixties. Among white English male musicians obsessed with American blues and soul, Arnold was the real thing with a gospel-tinged voice that could radiate both pain and joy.

Her debut single, a recording of Cat Stevens’ The First Cut is the Deepest, appeared in the Summer of Love, in 1967. Her follow-up was Angel of the Morning, arranged by a pre-Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones and unleashing a potent soul voice unmatched by later covers. She could rock too. A debut album featured input from various Rolling Stones. But her second album, produced by Eric Clapton and Barry Gibb, got swallowed up in record company politics and was never released. Gradually she morphed back into a backing singer hired by everyone from KLF to Roger Waters, whom she toured with for 10 years.

Arnold began writing her memoir in 1994 but couldn’t find a publisher. “When you’re hot you’re hot and when you’re not you’re not. Nobody seemed to be interested.” Her stock rose when she released an album of magnificent long-lost recordings in 2017, and went up again with The New Adventures Of... When a publisher approached she had her memoir at the ready.

One spur to write was a feeling she had been sidelined from history by the gerontocracy of rock. “I just thought, 'These guys were my friends, but they didn’t even mention me in their books.' I’m not ashamed. I was young, I was experiencing my life and hey, boom, here it is.”

The biggest booms involve the biggest names. Take Ike Turner. Arnold unflinchingly recalls the time he trapped her in a room and raped her. She’s kept it quiet until now.

“What can I say? It was awful. I despised Ike on that level, but I didn’t know how to express myself. I was told Tina wanted to get rid of me because Ike was after me. If I had run to Tina or called my parents, it would have meant I would have [had] to come home.”

And going home would have involved returning to her husband’s violence. She and David Arnold had been forced into a shotgun marriage when an attempted abortion with a sterilised coat-hanger didn’t work. She gave birth to her son Kevin aged 15. By 17 she had a second child, Debbie.

“David had this deep anger. He would never hit me on the face because he wouldn’t want my parents to know that he was beating me. I didn’t go to my parents with it. I just dealt with it.”

She’d had some practice, having been routinely beaten by her late father – an upholsterer; her late mother had been a housewife — throughout her childhood. “Sadly it was the way it was back then. I think it’s a lot to do with slavery and how that affected the black man’s psyche.”

PP Arnold, 75, photographed for The Telegraph in London last month - Clara Molden
PP Arnold, 75, photographed for The Telegraph in London last month - Clara Molden

It was Mick Jagger who persuaded Arnold to quit the Ikettes and try her luck in the UK. She became his lover, and his new girlfriend Marianne Faithfull enthusiastically joined in. Not a lot of detail is spared. “Mick was in heaven but Marianne was more interested in me,” she writes. “I had always been a good kisser and so was she. I tried to let myself go but I was also uncomfortable… ultimately it was Mick that I was infatuated with, not her. There was a plantation feel about it, like I was a plaything.”

When Arnold fell pregnant, she and Jagger agreed she should have an abortion. Jagger sent flowers but didn’t cut short his holiday in Morocco. She’s only revealing any of this now. (A spokesperson for Jagger declined to comment.)

“I was very private. I never flaunted it in the press. I wasn’t a hustler. I never shouted, ‘Oh I’m seeing Mick Jagger!’ ‘He wrote Brown Sugar about me!’ It never bothered me who he wrote it about because he’s never said. I hope that Mick knows that [the memoir] is not a kiss-and-tell. I hope he understands that.”

Then she met Jimi Hendrix and one thing led to another. “It was just so wonderful to be living round the corner, to have that support system from someone who could understand what I was going through.”

Ingénue: PP Arnold in 1965, age 18 - Alamy
Ingénue: PP Arnold in 1965, age 18 - Alamy

Like Hendrix she was seen as an exotic figure when she moved here. “Coming here was amazing for me, but it was also a very difficult time, integrating into a cosmopolitan, white society. It was through the music and the love of the music that I was accepted. They had never known a black woman, and for me to come with the credibility of working with Ike and Tina, they didn’t know that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I just loved to sing. That’s what saved my life. Most 18 to 19-year-olds – they’re not dealing with coming out of abused marriages and having children. It wasn’t easy for me just to be a normal young woman.”

She had a liaison with Steve Marriott, frontman of the Small Faces with whom she recorded Tin Soldier. He was the first Englishman to invite her home to meet his family.

As for the young Rod Stewart, she had fallen out of love with him by the time they recorded a duet. “The sex was cool,” she writes, “but he was also extremely arrogant and could be a spoiled brat if things didn’t go his way.”

“I mean really I have bones to pick with him,” says Arnold, who writes in her memoir about being caught in bed with Stewart after a drugs bust at her flat.

For the record, others who might give Soul Survivor a wide berth include Lulu (“very negative energy”), John Cougar Mellencamp (“crude attitude towards black women”) and Ronnie Wood’s first wife Krissy (“lazy and not very generous”). What will Marianne Faithfull say? “Marianne is probably cool about it,” she chuckles. “I’ve seen her in recent years. She knew I was going to write a book.”

Three's a crowd: Mick Jagger with his then-partner Marianne Faithfull in 1967 - Keystone-France
Three's a crowd: Mick Jagger with his then-partner Marianne Faithfull in 1967 - Keystone-France

With her children now joining her, Arnold signed to Immediate Records, founded by Andrew Loog Oldham shortly before he was sacked as the Stones’ manager. Her debut album was titled The First Lady of Immediate, a moniker which she greatly preferred to “Chocolate Button” conferred on her by one music critic.

“Andrew gave me really good creative management,” she says wistfully. “He had a vision for me. It’s a pity what happened.”

What happened is Immediate mysteriously ran out of money. She fared no better when, at the behest of Barry Gibb, she was taken on by Robert Stigwood to make a second album. The reality is Britain probably wasn’t ready for such a pioneer, but why was she so damned unlucky?

“Because I didn’t know anything about the music industry. I was getting closer to a whole development of myself as an artist. Barry, all those beautiful ballads. Eric with all those guys from the Dominoes, they just really hit that whole gospel funk aspect of me that had never been heard. Stigwood wasn’t into that. He wasn’t into me at all. I think definitely my life would have been different if that album had come out.”

Arnold receiving a kiss from her husband Jim Morris (left) and Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees on her wedding day October 1968 - Mirrorpix
Arnold receiving a kiss from her husband Jim Morris (left) and Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees on her wedding day October 1968 - Mirrorpix

Her second marriage, to Stigwood’s chauffeur Jim Morris, fizzled out not long before he went underground – reportedly to avoid arrest for smuggling cocaine to the US in vast speakers. In 1971 she had a third child – a son, Kojo –with Calvin “Fuzz” Samuel, who played bass for Manassas and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. She was offered a deal to record an album in LA produced by him but the material was never released.

“That was the beginning of my downward spiral. I made a lot of bad choices after that as a young parent. I wasn’t even 30 and I had two teenage children." Her chief regret, she says, was taking her children away from "a beautiful safe environment" in the Cotswolds and moving to North Hollywood, chasing a record deal. "Because when the family has problems it affects the children.”

Her great tragedy, which she addresses unsparingly, is the death in 1977 of her daughter Debbie, aged 13. She was killed in a car accident when she and friends skipped school and hitched a ride to the beach.

“She was a very special spirit. I haven’t had a serious relationship at all since my daughter died. It’s very difficult to find a good man just in normal situations. But, you know, it ain’t over till it’s over.”

Her memoir ends in 1984 with her roller-skating around the London stage after Andrew Lloyd Webber cast her in the original Starlight Express. Since then her remarkable story has, ever so slowly, progressed towards redemption. After the exhumed album and the impressive new release in 2019, a boxset bulging with unreleased material is promised and the musician splits her time between London and a home in sunny Southern Spain. Does Arnold finally feel like she is getting a happy ending?

“Well I could do with one. What’s important is where I am right now. How can I take all of these years of experience and just do something really great?”


Soul Survivor: The Autobiography by PP Arnold is published by Nine Eight Books on July 7, RRP £22. To buy a copy for £20 from Telegraph Books, click here