Gorgeous P.P. Arnold was one of the Ikettes, the backing singers for the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in the 1960s, but during a visit to London, Mick Jagger, impressed by her powerful voice and stunning beauty—who wouldn’t be???—connected her with the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who immediately signed her to his Immediate Records label, alongside acts like The Nice, Chris Farlowe (recognize this?), Rod Stewart and a pre-Velvet Underground Nico (who was then recording material that Bob Dylan had written for her along with session musicians like Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones). Another prominent group in the Immediate stable, the Small Faces, backed Arnold on a few of her songs, including “If You Think You’re Groovy,” which was written by Steve Marriott (who was briefly her boyfriend) and Ronnie Lane and could easily be seen as a Small Faces number—one of their very best, I might add—with her singing just as much as it could be a viewed as a “solo” P.P. Arnold single. It should be on every Small Faces compilation, too, if you take my point.
 

 
Marriott and Lane also originally intended “Tin Soldier” to be for P.P. Arnold, too, but opted to keep the song for themselves and have her sing along on their record. Here Arnold appears alongside the Small Faces for “If You Think You’re Groovy” and “Tin Soldier” on French television from 1968. For these two songs at least, she was effectively IN the Small Faces. She comes on at the 3:15 mark.
 

 

 
Everyone thinks that her hit version of the Cat Stevens-penned ballad, “The First Cut is the Deepest” is a cover, but she purchased the song from him—he was all but unknown at the time—and her version came out several months before his did.
 

 
Here she is duetting with Immediate labelmate Rod Stewart (who obviously took note of “The First Cut is the Deepest” himself) on “Come Home Baby”:
 

 
P.P. Arnold was really one of the artists given the most attention within the Immediate family but despite her astonishing beauty, phenomenal voice, social connections and an obviously strong work ethic, she never really made it. It’s just one of those things, but a talent like hers slipping through the cracks is improbable, I think you’ll agree. She was even given a sort of preferential treatment as such a pretty black American woman in swinging 60s London, as she has said herself. Her time of greatest activity was during the Immediate era, but after that label’s notorious implosion—allegedly one of the senior partners was embezzling from the company and sticking the money into an offshore bank account and no one got paid—nothing much came together for her again as a solo artist. Over the decades she worked with the likes of Barry Gibb (on an album that never came to fruition), with Boy George on the Electric Dreams soundtrack (singing the lush Culture Club ballad “Love is Love”) and Ocean Colour Scene.

Here she is singing an absolutely stunning version of the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody”:
 

 
P.P. Arnold has been firmly entrenched in the top tier of my “60s goddess” pantheon for years and years. Along with Marsha Hunt, she’s one of—in my opinion—the two absolutely hottest black women of that entire decade. It was super annoying to see Roger Waters right up front at Madison Square Garden a few years ago, only to find out that P.P. Arnold was one of his backup singers—she even had a featured number—and I didn’t even know it for a couple of days afterwards. I was crestfallen!

“Angel of the Morning” on Germany’s Beat-Club:
 

 
“Eleanor Rigby”:
 

 
“The Time Has Come” on Beat-Club in 1967: