LOGGING A BIG pop hit sometimes does more harm than good to artists who previously had a rather specialist appeal.

It's probably just a question of snobbery but once that big hit happens, many supposedly dedicated hard-core fans drop the artist like a hot brick, leaving him or her at the tender mercies of the fickle pop-buying general public.

Should the follow-up record fail to make the chart these new listeners melt away and the artist no longer has traditional fans to fall back on, and that's exactly what happened to Miss Nina Simone after 'Ain't Got No, I Got Life' hit the top.

Of course, Simone's attitude didn't help. Becoming ever more deeply involved in the black power movement her natural tendency to arrogance became amplified as she showed her disdain for white audiences.

The result was that, despite some fine recordings, a marked decline in popularity followed for the lady who had once seriously challenged Aretha Franklin as Queen of Soul, recorded that incredible 'Gin House Blues', the spine-tingling 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' and 'Put A Spell On You', plus the definitive version of 'Cherish' – later a big hit for David Cassidy.

For me though, her greatest triumph was the Nina Simone Sings Blues album which ranks among my all-time "top-10" soul albums, especially for the moving yet embittered 'Backlash Blues', which gave an early indication of the way her political feelings were going.

Lack of popularity means shortage of releases and, apart from a re-issue of old material in Pye's Golden Hour series there's been quite a long gap in releases up to the High Priestess's new album, Emergency Ward (SF 8304), recorded in-concert at various locations.

The sleeve is covered with reproductions of newspaper coverage of the Vietnam war yet the album itself is, in fact, virtually bereft of politicial or protest content, save for Miss Simone's musical adaptation of the David Nelson poem 'Today Is A Killer', and even that is equally pertinent to all of us, black and white, American and British alike.

'Poppies' makes a point too, but like the two George Harrison compositions, 'My Sweet Lord' and 'Isn't It A Pity', which complete this four-tracker, its strongest ingredient is purely entertainment and for that at least I'm grateful.

Now I don't object to artists holding political views, nor to their expressing them, but I do object to the kind of abuse and rudeness Miss Simone has hurled at her white fans.

It seems unethical, immoral even, to take somebody's money and then to show them a total lack of communication and willingness to try to solve the problems of racial disharmony.

All of this makes me even sadder to have to report that the LP is a very below-par effort.

Somehow it all seems sloppy and lacks the hypnotic spell Miss Simone wove over her audiences when I first saw her in-concert some years ago.

Try as I might to concentrate, I find my attention wandering, and the junior choir of the Bethany Baptist Church of South Jamaica, New York, who provided the vocal backings, are an irritating intrusion.

Trying to spread just four tracks out over a whole album doesn't help and the result is, to be frank, a rather boring set which will hardly convert new fans.

Let's just hope she can really start to set herself together and do something positive.