Wall of Sound, or Wall of Noise?

So Phil Spector has died. I was on holiday on a remote part of the coast with limited internet access at the time, so couldn’t have read the obituaries even if I’d wanted to. But let me guess that they almost unanimously hailed him as a flawed prodigy.

They would also, I imagine, have mentioned the so-called Wall of Sound – the recording technique Spector pioneered, in which masses of musicians were packed into the recording studio to create a dense, multi-layered aural barrage. I mean, why use only one drummer, one guitarist, one bassist and one keyboard player when you could have three or four playing each instrument in unison?

With Spector in the control room, the dial was permanently set at 11. That was supposedly his unique genius, and it led to preposterously hyperbolic comparisons with Wagner.

To be fair, lots of people admired him. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, for one, was in awe of Spector and yearned to emulate his sound, to the point that it became an obsession that almost literally drove Wilson mad. But if you ask me (and admittedly, no one has; the phone has inexplicably been silent), Spector didn’t produce a Wall of Sound so much as a Wall of Noise.

It was surely no coincidence that he was at his creative and commercial peak in the 1960s, an era when the American taste for bigness and excess was also evident in the grotesquely large, ostentatious cars rolling off Detroit assembly lines. Spector’s records were the aural equivalent of a 1960 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with its enormous bulk, acres of vulgar chrome and tailfins that were both outlandish and utterly pointless.  

It has always puzzled me that Brian Wilson measured himself against Spector and found himself wanting. Musically as well as physically, Wilson was a colossus compared with his pint-sized idol. I remain unconvinced that the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is the perfect album everyone says it was (although it included God Only Knows, one of the most exquisite pop songs ever written); but though Pet Sounds was supposedly influenced by Spector, it had subtlety and nuance in abundance. These are not qualities associated with Spector, any more than they are associated with the Cadillac de Ville (or, for that matter, the Harley-Davidson Electra-Glide, which came from the same era).

And here’s another thing. At the same time as Spector was being lionised for making noisy, overblown, bombastic music in LA, British producers and musical arrangers whom virtually no one has heard of – people such as Johnny Franz and Ivor Raymonde – were creating records which, while just as imposing sonically, also showed finesse, restraint and an appreciation of light and shade. Just listen to any of the big hits by the Walker Brothers or Dusty Springfield –  songs such as Make It Easy On Yourself, The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, All I See Is You, I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten – and you might see what I mean. These are big, powerful songs, but they resonate emotionally in a way that Spector’s records never did.

By way of contrast, check out River Deep – Mountain High, by Ike and Tina Turner. Spector regarded this 1966 recording as his magnum opus, the ultimate expression of his talent, but to my ears it’s a frenetic, undisciplined din with little to commend it other than its furious pace, noise and energy. (The original video’s worth watching, mind you.)

Spector was bitterly disappointed when River Deep tanked, peaking at No. 88 on the Billboard chart. Perhaps public taste had moved on by then; the 1966 Cadillac Coupe de Ville was notably more restrained than its predecessors, and all the better for it.