While many famous record producers are really just engineers with a bigger car and an ego problem, Spector has always been in a class of his own, with a sound so distinctive that he could shuffle singers and musicians around under the same group name from release to release and the public wouldn't notice. Personnel on singles by The Crystals or The Ronettes may have varied, but the quality never faltered.
In the days when four-track studios were regarded as outlandishly advanced, Spector regularly employed three or four pianos, two drummers, whole banks of guitars and enough backing singers to start a football team. His regular pool of musicians was known as The Wrecking Crew. As his former wife Ronnie Spector put it, "Phil was one guy who believed that more is more."
When the Beatles first arrived at JFK on their mission to bring Liverpool accents and pudding-basin haircuts to the Great American Public, it was Phil who followed them down the airplane steps. The Stones used to sleep at his New York offices during their early Stateside visits. At the start of the film Easy Rider, it was Phil again who bought the stash of cocaine which funded Fonda and Hopper's road trip prior to our hippy heroes having their brains splattered all over the highway by shotgun-toting rednecks. Clearly, this was a man with his finger on the pulse.
In 1968, Spector married his long-term girlfriend Veronica 'Ronnie' Bennett, lead singer of the Ronettes. By then, the stream of hits had dried up. Indeed, since 1966, when the record-buying public of the US failed to send Ike & Tina Turner's 'River Deep Mountain High' to the top of the charts where it belonged, he began spending more time at home in his mansion in Beverly Hills, with its 10ft high electric gates and large dogs roaming the grounds. He gave Ronnie a car for her 25th birthday, complete with an inflatable model Phil to sit beside her in the passenger seat: "So that nobody will fuck with you when you're driving alone."
Spector finished the 1960s producing The Beatles' Let It Be album, watching the four loveable moptops tear each other to pieces, and went into the new decade working with them on solo releases, including Lennon's 'Instant Karma' and Harrison's 'My Sweet Lord'.
As the 1970s came to a snarling end, New York punk pioneers The Ramones came to pay their respects. In 1979, Spector charted again with Da Brudders' version of 'Baby, I Love You'. But the recording of their End Of The Century album was somewhat more fraught. Years later, Dee Dee Ramone claimed that Phil had kept him locked up in his house for three days, while Johnny couldn't understand how Spector could spend 12 hours listening to the opening chord of a song.
By this time, interviews with Spector appearing in the press told strange stories of visits to a house behind high fences, where the lights were always kept low - and so was the temperature. Reading between the lines, it seemed that Phil rather enjoyed winding up journalists and public alike - a process he delights in to this day.
Completing a questionnaire for Esquire recently, he posed the question: "How is it that Michael Jackson started out as a black man and ended up as a white woman?" He also offered the following insight: "If I owned both Hell and Pasadena, I'd sell Pasadena and live in Hell." By contrast, those who have tried to do him down in public, usually appear to have lost whatever sense of humour they might once have possessed. In the 1982, South Bank Show documentary Da Doo Ron Ron, a fat, middle-aged, rock'n'roll-hating man can be heard whining: "Wall of Sound? Wall of Schlock, I call it!" This is Albert Goldman, the man whose books about Elvis and John Lennon succeeded in doing for the art of biography roughly what the Ebola virus did for Central Africa.
The criticism hasn't stopped anyone buying Phil's records, or playing them on the radio. Spector himself still lives in California, and keeps up with the latest developments. Commenting on the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber at an awards ceremony a few years back, he began by expressing his admiration, adding that some day he'd like to set them to music...
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