Mojo - The Music Magazine

As a new jury assembled at Los Angeles’ Count Superior Court this week for Phil Spector’s retrial for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003, they were informed by Judge Larry Paul Fidler that he was looking for individuals who were “fair and impartial” and followed his instructions. "What we do not want,” Fidler told jurors, “is people with an agenda."

With that in mind, it’s unlikely that the documentary team behind this evening’s terrific BBC 2 documentary, The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Phil Spector [previewed to MOJO yesterday], would have even made it inside the courtroom. For while this, the first major television interview with the legendary Spector - filmed inside his rambling 33-room "Pyrenees Castle" - is a dark, gripping, revelatory and at times hilarious portrait of the superbrain ’60s producer, it is also very much a film with an agenda: the defence of Phil Spector.

In keeping with the Arena documentary style, The Agony And The Ecstasy… dispenses with authorial voiceover, choosing instead to tell the astonishing Spector story through the man’s own words, his astonishing Wall of Sound productions, and the Court TV footage of the trial itself. The footage is as joyous as ever and Spector himself is utterly captivating, his memory immaculate, his speech medication-slurred and his eyes damp as he sits in front of Lennon’s white Imagine piano recalling the dark lows and glorious highs of a troubled life, from his father’s suicide (“I miss what I would have been with him”) to his famous hermetic lifestyle (“You can’t be ‘difficult’ if you’re unapproachable”) via his tragic, cursed quest to make greater and grander pop productions in which the singers are merely another ingredient in a megalomaniac quest for perfection.

However, it is the film’s final coup – the securing of the trial footage – that is both the making and the breaking of the documentary. Understandably transfixed by the pallid video images of grinning jurors, wheedling lawyers and Lana Clarkson’s audition tapes, director Vikram Jayanti chooses to score these post-mortem dissections with Spector’s epic spectral productions. Such juxtapositions – Lennon’s God accompanying images of gun-blasts, handgun collections and corpse shots; Woman Is The Nigger Of The World soundtracking a pathetic Clarkson audition tape in which she impersonates Little Richard are undeniably, surreally powerful, and lend the documentary an extra, heavy sadness, somehow suggesting the huge abyss between the ’60s pop dreams and counter-cultural ’70s and the mean, venal celebrity world of modern America. But this horrorshow of last-days America also excuses Jayanti from ever raising the gun/guilt question with Spector himself. This is a Spector life story that stops at Let It Be and starts again outside LA’s House Of Blues on the evening of February 2, 2003, bypassing all that problematic ’70s gun-play with Leonard Cohen and The Ramones.

And yet, and yet… if Spector had been asked any questions about his use of guns or his account of what happened on that night in February 2003 it could well have scuppered the whole interview and he would have only justified his innocence anyway. Instead we get Spector in excelsis, comparing himself to Leonardo Da Vinci, Gershwin and Einstein, repeatedly and inexplicably running down Tony Bennett, detailing how he nearly destroyed Robert De Niro’s career, performing an astonishingly good impersonation of John Lennon and explaining the complicated genesis of that hairstyle.

At the assembling of the new jury last week, one prospective juror said they felt unable to be objective, “considering someone of Spector's stature is on trial”. They might well have been talking about The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Phil Spector, which is neither fair nor unbiased but is still an unmissable music documentary.

Andrew Male

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The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Phil Spector, screens on BBC TWO, Saturday October, 9.40pm and is available to watch on iplayer for the next seven days.