MUSIC
PP ARNOLD ★★★★
Thornbury Theatre, May 18. Returns May 25 at the Night Cat, Fitzroy.

Acclaimed film 20 Feet From Stardom tells the stories of some of the world’s best black women soul singers of decades past – but upon whom the spotlight never quite shone long enough for them to achieve the same fame as the names they sang backing vocals and recorded for.

PP Arnold was not featured in that documentary – perhaps because she left the United States for England to support the Rolling Stones as part of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue - but she might well have been.

Arnold has seen it all and at the second of four intimate shows in Victoria she delighted in name-dropping, taking her audience on many a shimmy down memory lane. (At one point that included a walk through a park with Mick Jagger, laden with innuendo; and a sharp sting of black humour as she recalled Ike Turner giving her a hard time - “Not that hard!”)

It was as if her good friends the Bee Gees, the Small Faces, Cat Stevens, Eric Clapton and Jagger were all there in the room with us. But she had Australian music royalty backing her up instead, in You Am I (sans Davey Lane), the sumptuous Talei Wolfgramm on vocal harmonies and James Black (RockWiz, Men at Work, The Black Sorrows) on keys.