After bringing a (temporary?) halt to my revisits to the Sixties and Seventies I had been intending to revert to my habit of choosing a theme for these posts, and had actually decided on one for this week. However, when the news broke on Sunday that Phil Spector had died the day before I changed my plan: one of the biggest record producers of the period when I was growing up deserves a post to himself.

Spector is recognised as one of the most influential figures in the world of popular music: as well as producing – with his famous ‘wall of sound’ approach – he was also a songwriter, and scouted many of the acts who performed on the records he produced. He was a troubled figure, though, given to bouts of mental illness, and as you probably know he was, at the time of his death, serving a…