Great songs can be spoiled by awful production and bad songs are made unbearable with awful sound. There’s millions of them out there, all making your ears’ life a misery and doing their best to make you wish you were deaf.

Some of the greatest, most forward-thinking producers have been responsible for awful sounding records. The picture to the right should give you a clue about one such chap!

And so, the folks behind the ASUS Sonic Master campaign asked us to have a think about some dreadful sounding records, which saw one hecklerspray writer being thrown into the street with a copy of ‘Pet Sounds’ and the imprint of a size 10 in his posterior.

See, what got us thinking about dreadful records was the fact that this new ASUS Sonic Master laptop has been designed with music in mind. Good news for music enthusiasts… bad news for anyone responsible for the list of music below as with louder, clearer speakers, you’ll be able to hear every single glaring mistake.

Of course, it’ll be a dream if you have a well-produced record, like the Vengaboys debut album for example.

Before we start listening to badly produced records, you can play with the ASUS Musicbox site and send your chums some silly e-cards. Go to the Musicbox site and choose one of six music characters and upload your ugly face into it!

Now, let us check out some badly made tunes that could very easily shown up by the ASUS Sonic Master.

1. River Deep Mountain High

What happens when you get a whole host of brilliant instruments and turn them into soup? You get Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound at its most gloopy and impenetrable. Obviously, Tina’s performance is wonderful, but the rest of the record sounds like it has been recorded in a corrugated iron bomb shelter. Spector clearly peaked with ‘Be My Baby’.

2. Rolling Stones ‘Exile On Main Street’

‘Exile’ is arguably The Rolling Stones’ greatest album (okay, ‘Aftermath’ and ‘Let It Bleed’ ain’t bad either), but weirdly, it is also the worst recorded. The whole album is covered in a layer of sludge, the bass is often mixed so badly it sounds like leaves on the line and vocals dip in-and-out leaving you unable to work them out and… for the fan of the enthusiastic amateur, this is a dream, but for those that want a cleaner sound, this must be hellish in places.

3. Sly and the Family Stone ‘There’s A Riot Goin’ On

What happens when you promise girls a singing gig on your album in exchange for sexual favours? Well, if you’re Sly Stone, you gleefully accept those favours and then wipe all the recordings of the girls who sang and thereby ruin the tapes making your final recording very muggy indeed. Or so the legend goes. Of course, the production has its own charm and the album is an absolute classic, but you can imagine some studio jerk weeping over this ‘imagining how good it could have been…’

4. Velvet Undergournd & Nico

Don’t get Andy Warhol to produce your record, okay? You may well invent the punk aesthetic for generations to come, but seriously, you won’t hear most of what’s going on and, importantly, the loudest, heaviest group at the time will occasionally come across like weeds.

5. Hips Don’t Lie

Shakira and Wyclef’s dreadful pop-monster is one of the worst production jobs in music history. The whole backing track and Wyclef’s voice all nestle in with each other very nicely, but then, POW, Shakira’s voice comes along twice as loud as everything else and sounding for all the world like it has been recorded in a different room, in a different country, on a different planet. So separate is Shakira’s voice is that it sounds like she’s turned her back on the rest of the song!

6. The Beatles ‘Let It Be’

Oop! Here’s ol’ Phil Spector again, taking a pretty enough Paul McCartney ballad and covering it in so much syrup that one listen will give you instant toothache. Props also need to go to those awful stereo mixes of a whole bunch of Beatle LPs that made it impossible to share headphones on the back of the bus. We’re looking at you ‘Revolver’.

7. Iggy & The Stooges ‘Raw Power’

When David Bowie was given the task of producing Iggy and the Stooges ‘Raw Power’, someone really shoulda told him that he need not bother turning up. The best way to record The Stooges is to stick all the faders up to 10 and then go for a smoke. However, in Bowie’s hatchet job, he squeezed all the life out of the band leaving a record full of great records bordering on weak. In later years, Iggy Pop would remix the whole thing (as below), turning everything up to 10 as nature intended.

8. Husker Du’s ‘Flip Your Wig’

Take one thunderous band and stick them in a recording studio and then, magically, take the nuts off everything they record and make the drummer sound like his tap-dancing on a biscuit tin. Shame.

9. De La Soul ‘Three Feet High And Rising’

Deep funk and cartoon rhymes made for one of the greatest LPs ever made… however, once Prince Paul had done a fine job in the studio, someone decided to print the LP on vinyl so quiet that the static hum of your speakers was likely to drown out the music. Mercifully, this was rectified on the singles and remasters.

10. Anything by Kenny G

Do we really need to explain?

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Phil Spector is a great example of a person that should be divorced from the music he made. Basically, he’s a hideous prick… but some of the productions he gave us are magnificent. Of course, he’s not the only nasty shit that had a hand in great records, but he is a proper bastard.

As such, demented people like Mr Wall of Sound are much more interesting and thereby more likely to have films made of them. Can you imagine a biopic of Taylor Swift? It’d be 3 hours of someone saying “…which was nice”, apart from the brief Kanye appearance which, “turned out okay in the end.”

So who would play Phil Spector in a film? Would you need a separate team just to control his gigantic wigs? Well, Al Pacino is reported to be staring as the controversial music producer who is currently serving life in prison for murder.

If the idea of a  biopic about Spector’s life isn’t intriguing enough, the addition of Pacino makes it even more interesting. Pacino has apparently said he finds Spector a ‘very interesting character’. He means ‘absolutely barking mental’. Read between the lines folks.

In addition to this, the biopic is being made by HBO Films. We’re legally obliged by the Those In The Know Board to say that HBO is really cool and made The Wire. Even though The Wire really wasn’t that great.

If you don’t know what Spector did, in his prime, he was behind some of the best pop songs ever made. We’re talking The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’, the Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feelin’ and The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ album.

We all know that Spector was fond of sticking guns in people’s faces… just ask The Ramones who Spector was particularly fond of sticking a barrel in the faces of… and, well, he stuck a gun in the face of Lana Clarkson and, in what would be his downfall, pulled the trigger too.

At the time, he allegedly told one reporter:

“She kissed the gun.”

That’s a little too close to notorious Spector production hit, ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’ for our liking. Spector was a maverick in the studio and chilling in the flesh. It’s little wonder that there’s someone as big as Pacino lining up to play him.

However, Pacino is certainly too old to play a young Phil Spector if the film is to cover his entire life.

The as yet untitled film is said currently in development stages and no release date has been given. Whenever it comes out, it will attract a lot of attention, no questions.

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Chris Brown, the R&B singer, is unsure of how he is perceived by his fans. We know this, because that’s what he said in an interview.

Do they still love him for his music? Or have his tender sex songs lost a little bit of their appeal since he decided to practice Kung Fu on his ex-girlfriend Rihanna’s beautiful face? Yeah, it’s a concern, isn’t it Chris?

Unfortunately, sensual declarations of love to a backing track do tend to sound a bit watery, once you know that beneath the gargantuan teeth, and the promises of a better future, beats the thumping heart of a maniac just seconds away from a red mist. Sneeze at the wrong moment, and he might come at you with a brick. Still, all is not lost for Chris Brown. Using some templates from other famous people who have been unmasked for dodgy wrong-doings, here are a few paths that he could choose to tread…

1. Make a joke out of it

When Hugh Grant was caught having his gentlemanly penis attended to by a street-side prostitute in his car, it could have spelt curtains for the actor. Yet, Hugh turned the whole thing to his advantage by upping the ‘bumbling aristocrat’ setting on his personality, and doing the talk show rounds making stuttered apologies, and quips about not wanting to blow his own trumpet. George Michael was equally light-hearted when he was arrested for his penis-related misdemeanour in a local toilet. Hence, one option for Chris would be to hilariously send-up his violent outburst in a music video, or laugh hysterically and start clapping his hands whenever the incident is brought up in an interview. “Yeah, what a crazy night that was – you should’ve seen the other guy!” laughs Chris. Silence.

2. Divert attention by becoming increasingly weird

Phil Spector killed a woman. Seriously, actually killed one. With a gun. You were probably aware of that fact for about a second, before becoming distracted by the wild manner in which he wore his hair. During the murder trial, he became so odd looking that most people completely forgot that he once placed a pistol into a lady’s mouth, then pulled the trigger, because they were too busy wondering how he managed to achieve so much frizz without getting an actual perm done. Taking a similar line in distraction, Chris could perhaps fashion an interesting beard, or take to wearing a dress? Then will they be talking about the time he punched Rihanna in the face? No, they’ll be asking why Chris Brown appears to be wearing a woman’s frock. Bingo!

3. Deny everything

Yes, everyone seems pretty sure that they know the truth, but OJ Simpson has spent years denying any wrong doing on the night that Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death, even though he was then chased by the police, before providing a case that Columbo would probably crack in seven seconds – including a five second break to scratch his nose. Still, the constant denial worked for OJ as he was declared not guilty, and went back to his old life. Only with considerably less friends, money, or prospects. This could work for Chris. Simply backtrack, then deny everything. Yes, you won’t work again, but at least you wouldn’t spend long nights awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, regretting what you did…  Oh, you still would? Fine!

This was a guest post by Josh Burt from Interestment, who rules

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Phil Spector, you’ve let us down. Worse, you’ve let yourself down. For years we’ve been calling you the guy with the crazy hair.

But look at this new mugshot, Phil Spector. You’re bald. The top of your head is completely bald. So what can we call you now? The guy with the mad boggly eyes and the conviction for shooting a woman in the face at close range with a handgun? Hardly rolls off the tongue.

Fine, we’ll go with that. But you’d better not be faking your murderous resentment of females too, Phil Spector, or we’ll be sorely peeved.

Unless he lives to be 88 – which, let’s face it, seems unlikely given that he already looks partially mummified – it’s quite likely that Phil Spector will die in jail. So there’s a very good chance that this will be the last time any of us see him alive. And, from the bottom of our hearts, we’d like to sincerely thank Phil Spector for the generosity of his parting gift – a ridiculous mugshot of him being completely bald.

Throughout his murder trial and subsequent retrial for the murder of Lana Clarkson, we’ve marvelled at the sheer breadth of Phil Spector’s hairstyling abilities. There was the giant planet-sized afro, of course, as well as the confusing tribute to Help-era Paul McCartney and our own personal favourite, the haircut that made him look like a middle-aged power lesbian on a cruise ship holiday with some colleagues who she doesn’t know very well.

But now the shocking truth has been revealed – Phil Spector is bald. And also, to a lesser extent, a convicted murderer. A mugshot taken at California’s North Kern State Prison shows that Phil Spector was really a great big baldie all along. AP reports:

“They took my husband’s freedom and dignity. So why not his hair?” said Spector’s wife Rachelle, who had previously suggested that her husband’s thick mane of hair was his own. “This is a personal matter,” she said. “But in case you don’t know, they don’t allow for much accessorizing while in prison.”

Obviously being seen without the wig you’ve passed off as being real for several years would be a humiliating loss of dignity for anyone, but it’s even more symbolic for Phil Spector. He’s no longer a music industry bigwig, so he’s literally had to hand over his big wig. And – thanks to similar prison policies – we hear that his big cheese, big kahuna, big noise and top dog were also confiscated ahead of processing. How disappointing.

In many ways we’d be tempted to call this bald mugshot Phil Spector’s final insult. But that’d probably be a bit premature, since everyone knows that Phil Spector’s final insult will come when he’s inevitably gang-raped in a laundry room by a rag-tag gaggle of serial arsonists. And we believe that’s pencilled in for mid-July, so we’ll keep quiet.

[image: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]

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Phil Spector should be updating his CV today – underneath ‘producer’ and ‘creepy oddball’ he needs to add ‘murderer’.

That’s because – although scientists had forecast that it wouldn’t end until long after humans became slaves to their evil robot overlords – the Phil Spector murder trial has finally reached its dramatic conclusion. And apparently he did it – Phil Spector has been convicted of second-degree murder.

Phil Spector now faces a mandatory life sentence, reflecting the tragedy of the situation. Not that he shot Lana Clarkson, you understand, but that he didn’t shoot the person responsible for all his batty old lesbian wigs.

Well who’d have thunk. Phil Spector – the freakishly reclusive music producer mostly famous for his 30-year habit of furiously waving loaded guns in the faces of an endless parade of terrified women – shot a woman in the face and killed her. Weird, we know.

Yesterday – after six years, two criminal trials, countless lawyers, an almost comical repetition of the phrase ‘spatter pattern’ and a never-ending array of ill-advised, vastly unsuitable wigs that only served the purpose of making Phil Spector look like an army of very slightly different conservative lesbians with respiratory disfunction and a worrying case of delirium tremors brought on by a lifelong addiction to port – Phil Spector was convicted of the murder of Lana Clarkson, the actress turned waitress whose only crime was to accompany Phil Spector home and possibly suck him off on the night of her death.

Here’s how The LA Times reported the verdict:

As a Superior Court clerk pronounced the word “guilty,” Spector’s mouth gaped slightly, but he quickly returned to the stoic expression he has worn throughout his legal proceedings. The verdict of second-degree murder with the use of a firearm means the 69-year-old Spector faces a mandatory life prison term when he is sentenced May 29. He must serve at least 18 years before being eligible for parole.

Phil Spector must have had a suspicion that this verdict was coming. He’d already escaped one trial – which we reported in tedious detail here – thanks to the jury’s inability to reach a decision, and most of the subtle technicalities of the prosecutors’ case helped to paint a picture of murder rather than suicide.

For instance, one of the last things that Lana Clarkson ever did was buy several pairs of shoes, which doesn’t seem like the act of a suicidal woman. And also, when you’re on trial for killing a woman by shooting her in the head, it’s probably best not to have a history of repeatedly shouting that all women were “fucking cunts [who] all deserve a bullet in their fucking heads.” You know, the little things.

And looking at him yesterday, you could see that the fight had gone from Phil Spector. His body was stooped, his eyes dejected, and he was wearing a wig that made him look like a lesbian who doesn’t wash rather than a lesbian who spends a great deal of leisure time aboard cruise ships. He knew this was coming.

But still, let’s not be sad that Phil Spector has been convicted of the murder that everyone pretty much suspected he did from the outset. Prison offers a number of opportunities to a man like Phil Spector. Admittedly that list of opportunities can essentially be boiled down to a) getting his hair done in cornrows and b) being the victim of repeated anal rape, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Plus Phil Spector plans to appeal against the verdict, so if worst comes to worst this case will continue to rumble on listlessly until the end of time. Hooray!

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We’ve missed Phil Spector. Like many people we see him as the lesbian-haired wobbly old uncle who nobody trusts around women that we never had.

And that’s why we should all be greeting the retrial of Phil Spector over the alleged murder of Lana Clarkson like the celebration it is. For the next few months we get to go over all of Phil Spector’s greatest hits – the funny hair, the driver who he apparently confessed the murder to, the endless scientific discussions about bullet trajectory, the funny hair. The funny hair. And that all starts right now.

Well, OK, not right now. The second crack at the Phil Spector murder trial was set to begin yesterday, but it couldn’t because a juror fell over in the car park and broke his foot, forcing a postponement. Remember that if Phil Spector is found guilty of murder he’ll be given life in jail. So probably about a fortnight at this rate.

Ever since the Phil Spector murder trial collapsed in on itself last year, we’ve felt like a part of us was missing. You know, the scary part with the terrible hair, the voice that sounds like an ancient version of Sylvester The Cat having a stroke and the unsettling tendency to point guns at women.

We’ve been engulfed in a wave of uncertainty ever since. Did Phil Spector shoot Lana Clarkson in the face because she wouldn’t sleep with him? Did Lana Clarkson kill herself because she was depressed? Could Phil Spector’s haircuts physically get any gayer? Do we really have to go through everything again?

Apparently we do. It’s been just over a year since the Phil Spector murder trial ended with a deadlocked jury, and the time inbetween has been spent regrouping for the retrial. Both the prosecution and the defence have hunkered down, reflected on their respective weaknesses and assessed where to go in for the kill next time around.

And since yesterday was the first day of the Phil Spector murder trial redux, we were eager to see what had changed. Had Phil Spector’s choice to pick a more streamlined defence been a wise one? Has he finally worked out a decent response for that time he said that all women were ‘fucking cunts’ who deserved to be shot in the head? Would his decision to grow a new haircut that makes him look like Liam Gallagher in a rainstorm win him support, or yet more mockery?

The truth is, we just don’t know – apart from the last one, obviously (the answer is ‘yet more mockery’) – because on the way into the court to start the first day of the new Phil Spector murder trial, one of the jurors tripped over and broke his foot. The Press Association reports:

Music producer Phil Spector’s murder retrial was held up on its first day after a juror fell in the court car park and broke his foot. Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler said he spoke to the juror, who wanted to get medical attention and return on Monday.

It’s frustrating, we know, but both sides of this case now have a perfect opportunity to take this weekend to really intensify their courtroom tactics. The prosecution will no doubt be redoubling its efforts to claim that women don’t just shoot themselves in the face in the doorway of a sexually-aggressive midget’s house without taking their handbags off first.

And as for Phil Spector’s defence? Well, it won’t exactly hurt to make his hair a little bit more lesbiany again. It’s what the people want.

When Phil Spector needed a place to stay that wasn’t a prison, a jail, or a cot next to the furnace in a friend of a friend’s unfinished basement, The Westin Bonaventure kindly took him in, giving him something called ‘heavenly beds’ and possibly a continental breakfast.

But Spector (enter dark looming clouds) didn’t like bagels with cream cheese, small personal-size boxes of raisin bran or apples with tiny, brown, centimeter-deep puncture wounds on them. No, the continental breakfast definitely would not do. So maybe he ordered room service every single day instead.

Well whatever he did it looks like he was paying for extra of something – the hotel is currently suing him for $110,000 they claim he owes them. Will the hotel ever see this money? Probably not – but Spector’d no doubt be happy to throw in some unneeded “Wall of Sound” if that would help at all.

You know, the kind he used to toss around so freely circa 1970.

Phil Spector spent an awfully long time at trial over the murder/death of 40 year old Lana Clarkson, the woman that was found dead at his house. All arguements one way or the other temporarily ended when the jury deadlocked and a mistrial was declared.

Mistrial or no mistrial though – Spector had been renting several rooms at the Westin Bonaventure for he and his legal team. From what we’ve seen he kept up on payments the first four months, but then he began to let things slide – which probably really upset the bellhop who was standing there with his hand out.

According to the LA Times, the hotel claims:

“Spector stopped paying the bills for rooms four months into his stay at the Westin Bonaventure, a few blocks from the Criminal Justice Center where his trial was held, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

“Spector had an agreement to pay in advance every two weeks, according to the suit. The Westin provided Spector with special accommodations, including “heavenly beds,” complimentary workouts for his attorneys and a secured “litigation war room” guarded with key-card access, said Shari L. Rosenthal, an attorney for the Westin.”

The trial started April 24, 2006 and ended September 26, 2007. If he only paid the first four months ‘rent’ that means he was there for over a year without paying a dime. Perhaps the hotel’s reluctant permittance had something to do with all those unresolved murder allegations.

Still, we don’t know about you, but with rates like that we’re booking a room. Actually, make that two rooms, preferably adjoining, and have somebody roll breakfast in on a cart every morning around 9:30.

Please no gross looking apples.

To read more see ‘Hotel sues Phil Spector over $100,000 unpaid bills’ On The Associated Press Website