The Mazzy Star, Opal and Rain Parade songwriter, who has died aged 61, had a subtle but profound influence, paving the way for the hazy sound of Lana Del Rey
To the outside world at least, the late David Roback was a wilfully mysterious figure. He appeared to hate talking about himself. The journalists who got him to submit to interviews tended to come away with a handful of non-committal monosyllables that didn’t seem worth the painful effort it had evidently taken to extract them from him: one compared the experience to “swallowing sand”.
But it seems safe to say that the one thing Roback didn’t expect was to end up an influence on 21st-century mainstream pop: the world of Nordic songwriting teams and superstar producers was in a different universe entirely to the LA post-punk Paisley Underground scene Roback had sprung from. And yet, at the time of his death, that’s precisely what Roback had unwittingly become.