Inside story: The weird world of Mr & Mrs Phil Spector

[Geee]

U K Independent :

Inside story: The weird world of Mr & Mrs Phil Spector
He is the legendary music producer in prison for murder. She is the young wife protesting his innocence. Welcome to the curious world of Mr & Mrs Phil Spector

Interiew by Guy Adams

Two suits of medieval armour dominate the entrance hall of the hilltop castle that Rachelle Spector calls home. One stands opposite an oil painting of the Beatles, whose final album, Let it Be, was produced by her absent husband, Phil, in 1969. The other, a few yards to its right, leans on a large sword. Since Phil's fascination with dangerous weapons recently landed him in prison, you might wonder if they make for entirely appropriate ornaments. But in the few hours I spend with Rachelle, together with a couple of occasions when we speak via telephone, I come to realise that suits of armour actually sum her up pretty well: she's a tough cookie, and thick-skinned, too.

Rachelle greets me on the doorstep, where I've been admiring the personalised number plate of her Lexus SUV (it reads: "I Í Phil"). At first glance, she looks astonishingly blonde-haired, blue-eyed and bubbly; at second glance, the blonde comes from a bottle, and she's wearing bright turquoise contact lenses. But the bubbly bit is genuine. While she nips to the kitchen to fetch a drink, I look around her enormous dining room. It's decorated in the style of a Berni Inn: all dark wood and moody lighting. In the corner sits a huge piece of paper on which Rachelle, perhaps at the behest of a psychiatrist, has drawn a flow chart mapping her "life goals". They revolve squarely around two inter-related entities. One is Phil; the other, her pop career.

These are, as it happens, the exact subjects I'm hoping to talk about. For years, this famous 30-room house, which is called the Pyrenees Castle, and situated in Alhambra, a charmless suburb of east Los Angeles, has stood as a neo-Gothic monument to the eccentricities of the great Phil Spector. It was, according to rock'n'roll folklore, a Xanadu-like mansion, where the extraordinarily wealthy record producer, who had made a slew of the most uplifting pop songs in history (from "Da Doo Ron Ron" by the Crystals, to "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes) but suffered from the depression which afflicts many a genius, had retired from the record business to wallow in a twilight world of darkness and paranoia.

[pollyannaish]

Wow Strange story But the comments are the most interesting part.

 

 

"The famous fairytale of Rachel and the six gnomes"

[NCTexan]

 

Nothing weird to see here folks... keep moving.

[Casino67]

 

The lovely Rachelle Spector with a gun no less.

[nickydog]

And that other spook is Phil Spector?! And they're saying she's not a gold digger?? Yeah, sure.

[Valin]

In the dictionary under the word weird they have a picture of Phil Spector.

[nickydog]

Valin!