Pop music changed Phil Spector's world forever - yet in 1958, an art form that had yet to reach double figures, had yet to acquire a status beyond that of mere fad. The genius of Spector was to make records that sounded as stop-what- you're-doing breathtaking to the world as the very first pop music had always sounded to him. Ironically, he did so by invoking the classical records that he had heard as a youngster. “I knew about Toscanini,” he said, “I knew that Mozart was more important than his operas.” Explaining his Wall of Sound, he referred to it as “a Wagnerian approach to rock'n'roll: little symphonies for kids”.

Key to achieving the grandeur that continues to resound from old Ronettes and Crystals records were two major elements. Sheer manpower was the first. The same parts would be simultaneously played by what his biographer, Mick Brown, referred to as “regiments of bass players and guitarists, platoons of pianists; battalions of drums; massed ranks of horns and strings”. With the sound reaching critical mass and individual instruments often hard to pick out, Spector would then set about supersizing the effect. Then, he would play back what he had recorded into an echo chamber and record it all over again. Funnelled through the speakers of its intended medium - AM radio and record player speakers - the magnificently opaque Wall of Sound effect was complete.

In establishing his trademark sound, Spector reinvented the role of producer - transforming it from that of backroom technician to pop's equivalent of a film director. And in doing so, he enlarged the role to a size that was proportionate to his obsessive ego.

He spent six months finessing You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling by The Righteous Brothers, ensuring that - at an unprecedented four minutes long - it got played on the radio by lopping one minute off the time on the label. According to the guitarist Barney Kessel, Spector approached sessions for the song “like he was going to invade Moscow”.

In 1961 - the year he launched his Philles label - the notion that his conceptual “wall” might one day outlive the one separating Berlin would have seemed laughable. But thanks to an influence that has reverberated through every successive generation of pop - from The Beach Boys to The Ramones; from Abba to Glasvegas - it looks set to stay standing long after Spector and the demons that brought him to this sorry denouement.

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