We've had lots of letters

Well, one, actually, but it's a quite interesting one, from Andrea Pearson. Who she? She's with The Climb, whose song about Lana Clarkson somehow turned up on the ContactMusic site during the jury deliberations in the Phil Spector trial, and from there to here. Andrea offered her band's side of the story:

I genuinely did write the song with the best of intentions - what can I say? I'm a geek! I've written songs about Kurt Cobain's life, Marti Pellow's drug addiction, and Channel 4's Derren Brown! (PLEASE don't ever quote me on that!) Not that you'd know that any of those songs are about those people. The Lana song was a bit different. I called it just "Lana", and when it came to making a demo EP, I thought it'd make a change to actually point out the song was about a real person, so named it "Who Shot Lana Clarkson". It was actually a play on Who Killed Laura Palmer (from Twin Peaks) or Who Shot J.R (or even Mr Burns from The Simpsons). Although it's been sent out as a demo, I never thought for one second that Lana's family and friends would hear it. I just hoped at the time (autumn 2005) that some nice label would say "hey, this demo's ok, so let's give this band lots of money and help them record their songs professionally, because at the moment the demo sounds a bit ropey"!

As for my "long mediation on the guilt or otherwise of Phil Spector" the quotes were just taken from a private email that I wrote to one of Lana's friends - I'm hardly going to say I think the guy should walk away free! I swear I didn't know it was going to get quoted in a press piece. If I had, I'd have said that I actually think Phil Spector was a musical genuis (in his time), and that it was probably all a very nasty accident, but he should still be held accountable. I'm certain (from all I've read) that it wasn't suicide, and that she'd still be alive today if he hadn't insisted she'd gone home with him. I wrote the song because the story was tragic, not because I thought other people would find it interesting.

Anywhooo, I feel better for getting that off my chest. Maybe I have a "desperate need to be thought of as good-ish"! My band's about to get accused of being "too nice" on a reality-talent-show because we didn't argue with the judges and don't dress like rock stars. (All the other bands in the competition looked like they were out of a Wella advert.) Unfortunately that's the nicest thing they could say about us, as the rest of their comments were, um, really harsh! (Bad sound on stage, wasn't our fault, I swear!)

Unlike ContactMusic, we did check with Andrea before publishing this, by the way. It's interesting to get the context behind this story - especially the way it appears to have ended up on the internet in the first place - and the motivation looks a lot less cynical when put back into context.

You can make up your own mind - and hear more of the band's music - on the band's Soundclick page.