Here’s something you may have forgotten, if indeed you ever knew it at all: Phil Spector’s final production job wasn’t for some A-list artist or contemporary from the golden age of '60s pop, but with slightly obscure early Noughties indie band Starsailor.
A few months before he murdered actress Lana Clarkson at his mansion in LA, Spector had twiddled the knobs on two songs from the band’s 2003 album Silence Is Easy – the title track and White Dove.
Now, in an interview with ContactMusic.com, Starsailor frontman James Walsh has been remembering that episode. “Initially, we did a trial week with him because the label was a bit cautious because he hadn’t worked with anybody for so long,” he recalled. “They obviously saw it as a big opportunity but they were like, ‘We need to see if he’s still got it.’”
“That initial week was really productive … Then we agreed to reconvene to finish the album but something wasn’t right when we got back together, Phil was quite hard to communicate with and he was on a lot of medication. It got to a point where it was unworkable.”
Spector’s reputation in the studio went before him. Sure, he was a production genius. But he had waved guns at John Lennon during the Rock N’ Roll sessions and taken The Ramones hostage at gunpoint whilst making End Of The Century. Starsailor, though, didn’t see any drama, at least not on that scale.
“He was distant and uncommunicative,” Walsh remembers. “The only eccentric thing we saw him do was wear a different wig every day, which could be quite distracting and strange!
"But we didn’t see any kind of anger or anything like that from him. We recorded in London so there weren’t any firearms around.”
Like everyone else, Walsh said he was stunned when he heard the news of Lana Clarkson’s murder: “There’s no point pussy-footing around it. It was horrific."
In 2026, Spector’s work is still widely heard. It may well be that, like Michael Jackson, his back catalogue is simply too beloved ever to be cancelled. “It’s mad to me how many of his songs are still played … I guess people are still able to separate the art from the person producing it," said Walsh, though he added it would be unfair to “penalise” the artists whose names, after all, are on the records.
Spector died behind bars, aged 81, in January 2021. And whither Starsailor? Well, they’re still with us. They released their sixth album Where The Wild Things Grow in 2024 and James Walsh has a solo album out at the moment, entitled It’s All Happening.
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