100 Greatest Songs of the 60’s #29 The Ronettes – Be My Baby

Released: 1964

Everyone loves a story. Writing in the Record Mirror in the wake of Be My Baby’s success, Peter Jones addressed the question hot on every pop picker’s list; how did The Ronettes connect with Phil Spector, the man who’d penned, produced and released the song on his own label?

The answer was some tale. Apparently Jones recounted group member Estelle Bennett was making a phone call to magazine editor Georgia Winters, but – what were the odds – dialled Spector instead, and after a brief conversation the maverick decided that the trio would be ideal to provide backing vocals on a tune he had going with Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’. The rest was history.

Well not quite, but whatever really happened – Spector it turned out was already aware of the group off the back of their performances at a New York club – fate decreed that Bennett, her sister Veronica (“Ronnie”) and Nedra Talley were landed with one of the greatest soul pop tracks ever to be recorded. Ronnie was landed with something else too later, but that’s another story, for another time, and this piece of musical theatre with it’s unmistakeable drum break remains as the single truth you can take from the whole damn thing.