LOS ANGELES (AFP) - The five-month murder trial of Phil Spector reaches its climax late Monday when jurors retire to consider whether the pop music legend is guilty of killing a B-movie actress four years ago.

After five months of testimony involving nearly 80 witnesses, the jury at Los Angeles Superior Court will receive final instructions from Judge Larry Paul Fidler before beginning their deliberations around 11:30 am (1830 GMT).

Spector, the musical pioneer who created the "Wall of Sound" recording technique responsible for a string of 1960s hits, faces 15 years to life in prison if found guilty of murdering actress Lana Clarkson, 40.

Spector, 67, said in a rare newspaper interview published in London over the weekend that he believed Judge Fidler disliked him and that the legal establishment was waging a vendetta against him.

"The judge doesn't like me," he told the Mail on Sunday.

"He's already said that if I made a plea bargain, he'd give me eight years. Because someone died. And he keeps saying that every time I go court.

"To the jurors, the first thing out of his mouth was, 'remember today we're here because someone died.'

"Even though I was eight foot away from her when she died, and it can be proved forensically I didn't kill her, it doesn't matter.

"Somebody died, that's his frame of reference. That's what he thinks."

Prosecutors allege that the reclusive Spector shot Clarkson in the head as she attempted to leave his castle-like mansion, after meeting him for the first time only hours earlier at the nightclub where she worked.

Defense lawyers say Clarkson, best-known for her role in Roger Corman's 1985 cult classic "The Barbarian Queen" but whose career had stalled at the time of her death, killed herself.

No fewer than five women acquaintances of Spector have testified that the genius behind 1960s hits such as "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" threatened them with guns in incidents dating back to the 1970s.

Spector's former chauffeur also provided damaging evidence, telling jurors that on the night of the shooting his employer had emerged from a doorway clutching a pistol in a bloodied hand to say: "I think I killed somebody."

However defense lawyers have argued that there is no scientific evidence that proves Spector fired the shot that killed Clarkson.