Phil Spector obituary

Record producer influential in 60s pop as the creator of the wall of sound' who in 2009 was jailed for the murder of Lana Clarkson

• Phil Spector, pop producer convicted of murder, dies aged 81
• Phil Spector brought joy to pop music - and misery to so many lives

By the time he reached his mid-20s, Phil Spector, who has died aged 81, had achieved his ambition of making records that elevated the craft of producing pop singles to something close to an art, the prodigious commercial success of his miniature epics leading Tom Wolfe to describe him, in a celebrated 1964 essay, as the first tycoon of teen".

Even as those words appeared, however, the first signs of Spector's decline were beginning to appear, and the remainder of his life represented an accelerating sequence of bizarre behavioural episodes ending with the death by gunshot at his Los Angeles mansion in 2003 of Lana Clarkson, an actor whom he had met that night in a Hollywood bar where she worked as a waitress. Six years and two highly publicised trials later, a jury's unanimous verdict finally pronounced him guilty of murder.