P.P. Arnold
Acoustic Stage, Sunday June 29, 2025
Born in Watts, Los Angeles, but justly dubbed the First Lady of British soul, P.P. Arnold added gospel grit and lustre to the UK pop scene from the mid-’60s on, with her own records and as a funky fellow traveller with the Small Faces, Traffic and more.
Seventy-eight years old but still shaking a tail-feather, despite today’s infernal heat, in a spangly black asymmetric dress her old boss Tina Turner would not have turned her nose up at, she’s a revelation, belting into Wat’cha Gonna Do (When I Leave You) with vintage defiance, and racing breathlessly through a tidy selection of other classics, fretting that “I usually do two hours and they’ve only given me 40 minutes”.
Supported by two guitars, bass, drums, keys and a backing singer – appropriately tight and eager, equally at home in Northern Soul, soul-funk and gospel-rock environs – Arnold’s high spots include a 1970-vintage version of her swampy Traffic hand-me-down, Medicated Goo (“produced for me by Eric Clapton,” she reminds us) and her 1968, Steve Marriott-penned single (If You Think You’re) Groovy.
But Arnold is much more than a well-rehearsed vessel for her ’60s and ’70s releases. Touchingly, today she essays Sly Stone’s Fresh arrangement of Qué Será, Será (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) and, more impressively as it’s less obviously in her wheelhouse, The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows. In the latter, she hits a hair-raising falsetto and in a Pentecostal breakdown, takesBrian Wilson to church. She shouts out to both these passing greats; but the greatest tribute is the time she and her band have devoted at short notice to rehearsing these thoughtful covers.
While timetable clashes are the bane of the Glasto-goer – in order to see this, you’ll have to miss that – it seems particularly cruel for fans of a certain milieu of British music to have to choose between Pat Arnold and Rod Stewart, playing a 15-minute hike away, but Arnold doesn’t allude to it till the very end of her set.
“I need to do this song before Rod does it,” she smiles. “This is my song.” Cue her deathless 1967 debut single The First Cut Is The Deepest. And no-one watching her supremely elegant take on it at Glastonbury today would consider challenging her ownership.
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Photo: P.P. Arnold at Union Chapel, London, May 14, 2022 (Credit: Robin Little/Redferns)