Starsailor

These young Brits lured legendary producer Phil Spector out of a 20-year retirement ... then mustered the nerve to fire him.

A couple years ago, wide-eyed innocent abroad James Walsh sat at a chilly patio cafe in San Francisco, contemplating the overnight success of his small-town U.K. combo Starsailor. Thanks to his chimey guitar chords and soaring, almost operatic lead vocals—not to mention some emotional, deeply personal lyrics—the quartet’s debut, Love Is Here, moved over a million units, and homeland tipsheet New Musical Express even pegged Walsh “best new artist in Britain.” But as he quietly sipped his coffee, marveling over scenic California, Walsh seemed tentative, unsure of himself and of Starsailor’s overwhelming success.

Things have changed. Quite dramatically, in fact.

Walsh, nearing 23, had to acquire an almost leonine confidence—and quick. Sixteen months ago, he and longtime girlfriend Lisa had a daughter, Niamh (pronounced ‘Neve’). Niamh wasn’t planned, but he welcomed her into the world, and welcomed the newfound responsibility as well. “There’s nothing like starting a family to bring you crashing down to earth,” he chuckles, in a more solidly much brassier adult tone. “And it just makes your life that much more real—you have to do ordinary things that become quite inspiring, like changing nappies and shopping for baby food.”

Songwriting certainly hadn’t been a problem. Motivated by fatherhood, Walsh composed a bevy of potential hits: new Starsailor anthems like “Fidelity,” “Born Again” and “Bring My Love.” And, filled with new confidence in his capabilities—during the recording of Silence Is Easy, the band’s sophomore effort for Capitol Records—Walsh even had guts enough to fire legendary producer Phil Spector, who’d been overseeing the project.

But not before Spector completed two picture-perfect songs—a lushly orchestrated ballad called “White Dove” and the stomping wall-of-sound title cut, which—driven by handclap percussion and the buoyant piano of Barry Westhead—builds to a gorgeously crashing crescendo. How does an artist go about cutting loose such an A-level auteur? And how did Starsailor wind up as Spector’s first studio assignment in 20 years? Walsh is suitably humble when recounting the surreal tale.

It all started, the singer says, with a Los Angeles radio promotions representative. Performing in town at the Troubadour, Starsailor was introduced—through the executive—to Spector’s daughter, who casually informed the band her dad was a huge fan. “And we thought that was it, we met Spector’s kid, which was kinda cool in itself,” Walsh says. “Then the next time we were in L.A., he invited us up to his mansion, just completely out of the blue. To actually meet the man and work with him was not in our wildest thoughts, actually.”

First impressions? “Awe,” Walsh says. “Just awe. We drove up in a people mover and we had to go through his security, and at the time he had an ex-LAPD guard waiting to greet us at the gates. And his house has got 15 bedrooms—it was more like a castle, this chateau where he lives.” The band entered the abode, then waited in a drawing room. After 30 minutes, the Grand Poobah made his appropriately ostentatious entrance. “Wearing his Phil Spector suit—he wears suits with ‘P.S.’ embroidered on ’em,” Walsh continues. “There was definitely some sort of pomp and circumstance about him, but once we got past that, he was pretty easy to get on with. He’s a great conversationalist, still—he’s really great with people, pretty charismatic and very open. He was always talking about The Beatles and the Stones and all these things, and we were surprised at how normal he was the first time we met him.”

Things soon got stranger. Spector—who has since been charged with the murder of B-flick actress Lana Clarkson, shot to death in that same residence—invited Starsailor for lunch. A lavishly catered repast, no doubt? Walsh chortles. “No, it was ham sandwiches. Pretty ordinary by a multimillionaire’s standards. But Phil choked on his—our drummer [Ben Byrne] had to give him the Heimlich maneuver.” Right away, as if it were a foregone conclusion, Spector talked about producing Starsailor. He praised the group’s musicianship in general, and Walsh’s voice in particular. The band was on cloud nine. “It felt like a huge turning point for us,” Walsh recollects. “To work with such a legend, just the status that it would give us was a big bonus, as well. I mean, I regard Blur and Radiohead as frontrunners of British music, and we still regarded ourselves as minnows. And if he was gonna come out of retirement, surely he was gonna work with Bruce Springsteen or Radiohead. It was just a complete shock when he started saying ‘We’re gonna get Jeff McDonald, my old engineer, and we’ll do it at Abbey Road, just like [George Harrison's] All Things Must Pass.’”

Two months later, Spector—true to his word—flew to England for a trial production week. “But the first sign that he hadn’t worked for a long time,” Walsh says, “was when he phoned up Jeff McDonald, who he’d worked with on John Lennon and George Harrison stuff, and he said ‘I’m sorry, Phil, I can’t do it—I haven’t engineered anything for the last 20 years, and I’ve now got a job as a masseuse.’ But the trial run went brilliantly, and the two tracks that ended up on the album were done in that week. That was the most productive period.”

Walsh remembers being stunned on first hearing the finished version of “Silence Is Easy.” He thought it sounded as perfect as “Instant Karma”—an instant first single. But when Spector returned for the full sessions, suddenly everything began sounding like “Instant Karma.” “Pretty soon, we had eight or nine cuts which all had the same drumbeat, the same wall-of-sound thing—it was like all the hard work we’d done, all the eclecticism in the songs had been sucked out of ’em. And that was the frustrating thing for us—we’d heard all these stories about Phil being this great taskmaster, having his bands work ’til all hours and really cracking the whip on ’em. But it was the complete opposite for us—we were the ones who wanted to work, but it seemed to take him a while to get going.”

Reportedly, Spector has always had a fascination with guns, with elaborate security measures. Did Starsailor observe any weapons on hand? No, Walsh says. “We didn’t see a single one. But he was pretty pissed off when we said that we didn’t like what he’d done. At first he just said ‘All right, it’s your baby, it’s your decision.’ Then he called a meeting the following week and he had [lawyer] Allen Klein in the room that time. And he was a bit more angry— he started turning the tables on us, saying ‘All you’re interested in is playing PlayStation and you weren’t prepared to work!’ It was definitely a headmaster kinda thing.” Spector and Starsailor parted company acrimoniously, and the band went on to self-produce the remaining songs their way.

Ironically, sweeping anthems like “Telling Them” and “Music Was Saved” feel every bit as elegant and elegiac as the Spector work. Walsh agrees. “I think when you work with Phil Spector, he inevitably leaves his mark. But with our second record, we weren’t ready for the ‘Spector album’—we still had a lot of groundwork to lay in getting Starsailor across and defining what Starsailor are about. In retrospect, if it had been our fifth or sixth album—like the Ramones when they worked with him—we might’ve been more inclined to let him have his way.”

“Phil Spector has definitely got an extremely high opinion of himself, which he deserves, obviously,” Walsh concludes, returning to his soft-spoken, self-deprecating self. “But there are a lot of people I admire just as much … like Bruce Springsteen or Michael Stipe, who—for all intents and purposes—are still quite humble. And that’s what we wanted to do on this album, to record like Springsteen did with the E. Street Band. You listen back to those records and you think ‘F---ing hell! They were having a good time there, really enjoying themselves!’ And we just couldn’t have done that with Phil Spector.”