Phil Spector defined the toxic music svengali – a figure that persists today

Spector, who has died aged 81, created a culture of cruelty that was seen by the music industry as a symptom of genius. It’s a scenario that has played out again and again

The list of abuses Phil Spector doled out to his ex-wife Ronnie Spector is horrifying. He threatened to display her dead body in a glass-lidded gold coffin if she ever left him; he wouldn’t let her wear shoes in the house in case she ran away, and he put barbed wire and guard dogs around his mansion to make sure that she couldn’t. On the rare occasion he allowed her out alone, she had to drive alongside a life-sized dummy of Spector, cigarette in its mouth. Thanks more to luck than mercy, she escaped barefoot through a broken window.

Just as horrifying is the list of artists who continued to seek Spector’s studio magic despite common knowledge of his menacing behaviour: the Beatles, John Lennon, Dion, Leonard Cohen, the Ramones. After a period of estrangement, his brief turn-of-the-millennium revival was short-lived: Celine Dion and Starsailor both ended up firing him. In a Guardian interview from 2003, shortly after Spector was arrested for the murder of Lana Clarkson, the Wigan band’s frontman James Walsh expressed concern that, were Spector innocent, he might be traumatised by the arrest. “It wasn’t nice seeing him like that,” he said of a photograph of Spector being led away by police. You hope he never saw a picture of the murder scene, Clarkson’s broken teeth sprayed around the carpet after Spector shot her in the mouth. (In a statement released after Spector’s conviction, Walsh said “It is hard for me to pass judgment on whether he is guilty or innocent.”)