The lights go out. You can hear the sound of people shuffling onto stage and then instruments being tested for sound. Voices come in, goofing around and practicing harmonies and lyrics. It’s 2002 but Al, Mike, Dennis, Carl are right there in the dark laughing and getting ready for a take as a 22 year old Brian Wilson comes in over the studio talkback to bark them into silence. He gets it for a few moments then….LIGHTS ON!

Brian Wilson, aged 59, is there centre stage behind a keyboard surrounded by his band with The Wondermints as its foundations. The drum beat rings out as they launch into ‘The Little Girl That I Once Knew’ which Brian sometimes in interviews names as his favourite song he wrote. You realise that this most unlikely thing is happening – you are in the same room as Brian Wilson as some of the greatest pop music ever written is performed with the love and respect it deserves. That introduction of the show blurs the line between reality and a past where Brian was with his musical and actual brothers and the musical world was at his feet.

It now seems a minor miracle that the return of Brian Wilson to a live stage happened at all, let alone for another 20 years after I first saw him at London’s Royal Festival Hall on 30th January 2002. How much he contributed the live experience often seemed to depend on his state of mind that day, his feelings towards individual songs and the memories they fired off in that moment. His moves were stiff and robotic, his lines with bandleader Jeff Foskett well rehearsed and scripted and keyboard rarely touched. Yet like the genius (first use of that word, I’ll try and keep it to a minimum) producer he was, he always seemed to listening intently to the band, nodding and smiling at certain musical passages.

Acid casualty, prisoner of psychotherapist Eugene Landy’s treatment that no doubt saved his life but then came to define it, the young deaths of his brothers Carl and Dennis plus mental issues which made life unbearable. That he could later sing the lines ‘ And if you wanna find me I’ll be out in the sandbox \ Just wonderin’ where the hell all the love is gone….I’m lyin’ in bed just like Brian Wilson did’ from Barenaked Ladies song ‘Brain Wilson’ shows the humour of the man that everyone has mentioned in their tributes this week but also accepting how dark it got.

The music that Brian created has been part of my life as long as I can remember as one of my earliest memories is of that pinky red MFP label going round and round as that strange old ‘Good Vibrations’ LP played on the brown (everything in the 70s was brown) family music centre. You can read about that album here and how a life long love of The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson began. I think that album that featured songs from 1963 ‘Surfin USA’ through to ‘When A Man Needs A Woman’ from ‘Friends’ actually gave me more of an idea of what The Beach Boys were about than an album of their 60s hits would have.
‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ is a heavy lyric with a corresponding strange. melancholy arrangement and Good Vibrations really challenged the idea of what a pop song or even music could be.

On 29th March 2003 I was at Madness’ Teenage Cancer Trust gig at the Royal Albert Hall in one of the boxes wearing a Beach Boys related T shirt. I only say that because a fella in the next box leant over and said “You know that Brian is performing ‘Smile’ at the Festival Hall next year’ and I expressed surprise but in my mind thought ‘the fuck he is, yer drunk’. The strange thing is that the official announcement of the February 2004 world premiere didn’t happen until a month later after the Ivor Novello Awards across town where Brian picked up a ‘Special International Award’ to a standing ovation.

It was relatively easy to get tickets for the four initial planned gigs at the Royal Festival Hall including the opening night on 20th February 2004. There was no dynamic pricing, no presale, no VIP packages or website crashing. Front stall tickets were £60, which is £110 in todays money which is still pretty cheap and I was in for 2 on my own and two with friends. Later via David Leaf’s ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ documentary we learnt how perilous and complicated the journey to that opening night was and in the back of your mind you suspected as much.

It wasn’t just the physical act of Brian being on that stage playing music with such public legacy, personal heartbreak, weighed down with failure, fear and regret but he had to finish a project he had abandoned 35 years earlier. To write new arrangements, new lyrics and piece everything together into a 3 movement ‘teenage symphony to God’. With Smile Session obsessive and band keyboardist Darian Sahanaja and original Smile lyricist Van Dyke Parks they achieved the impossible.

Its hard to describe the atmosphere in the hall that opening night as I can only compare it to other concerts where the audience felt that the most unlikely thing in the world was about to happen. A couple of months after the Smile premiere I was at Brixton Academy witnessing the live return to the capital of indie gods Pixies and a decade later getting more and more nervous as the clock ticked down to kate Bush appearing in front of my eyes on the Hammersmith Apollo stage. There was a buzz of charter and laughter in the air, celebs sprinkled through the foyer and not being hassled for selfies etc and almost willing Brian and the band on. It was clear there were people from all over the world who had travelled to see this night and were damn sure they’d make their pleasure felt.

The concert started with a low key ’round a campfire’ setup with acapella harmony singing like they would have done while rehearsing in order to make Brian feel relaxed.
The first half ended with the 1-2 punch rock of ‘Marcella’ & ‘Sail On Sailor’ but then there was 20 minutes of nervous tension for everyone on that part of the South Bank. They returned to what I’d call ‘polite applause’ as if we didn’t want to spook anyone and make them flee in fear. Dead pin drop silence like I’ve never heard 2,700 not make before as if we were all holding our breath. It was very much a night for cliches and superlatives and I don’t apologise for that. As ‘Our Prayer’ wordless vocals began its was magical and when the hum before Gee broke there was a smattering of applause that broke the ice, We were in and there was no turning back.

As ‘Good Vibrations’ (with new lyrics? Fucking hell!) ended and Jeff Foskett turned round his white guitar to reveal ‘SMILE’ written in that familiar font , the place erupted. People were cheering, jumping, weeping, shouting and applauding with this huge release of energy – relief, joy, wonder, happiness, excitement and disbelief at what they had just witnessed. Smile was real. Not just a fans mix , not a bootleg, not a magazine article or theory but Brian Wilson’s concept of Smile existed at last. He’d got over all the fear and misgivings, all the voices in his head telling him not to and he, his band and collaborators had presented the album in a live context. That ovation just seemed to go on and on and it was only Brian leaving the stage for the encore that dissipated it in any way, If he had stood there for hours, we would have poured love & respect towards him until he’s had his fill.

I ended up seeing the Smile show eight or nine times. It was the 2nd night that they nailed it brilliantly. The opening night they had been tentative and nervous unsurprisingly but the next night they cut loose, had more fun and you could tell from looks and their smiles (no pun intended) bouyed by the reaction on the 20th that they knew thaey had it in the pocket. “Who needs Mike Love?” a masked man * shouted which made Jeff Foskett laugh.
On the fourth night just before the 1st half there was a hubbub at the right rear of the front stalls. Oh , that’ll be Sir Paul McCartney leaning over to the row in front to shake hands with Sir George Martin then. They’d come to see the bullet they had dodged. When the 2nd half began, Paul only returned to his seat when it was dark but a few hundred flashes exploded in that part of the hall.

Over the next decade I saw Brian about a dozen times aside from Smile. he clearly loved British audiences as he premiered his ‘That Lucky Old Sun’ project back at the Royal festival Hall in September of 2007. We’d embraced ‘Pet Sounds’ and the band back in 1966, putting them ahead of The Beatles in music paper polls. After the failure of Smile until the early 70s we supported them as a great live act. I stopped going when I felt that Brian was just not participating that much anymore and didn’t seem to be enjoying the live experience in any way. I appreciate that was just my personal take and it meant I didn’t go to the Beach Boys reunion shows which I regret.

His death this week while not a shock as his health issues had been widely reported hit me harder than I thought. Never met him, it probably ahve been awkward for both of us cos I wouldn’t know what to say but the impression I got that he was a kind, funny and emotive person who just wasn’t made for these times. Genius is overused in music to the point it becomes meaningless. When I call him a genius that isn’t to denigrate any of his collaborators, bandmates and musicians that played on those records but I’ve listened to hours of Beach Boys studio tapes. He used voices and musicians in ways that few others did, it was all in his head and he just needed them to hear it too. He used the best musicians available because he knew they were able to work fast, understand and interpreted his ideas quickly.

I’m so happy that he got that 20+ year live victory lap where he came to realise that not only was he loved for what he had done when he was in his 20s and 30s but that he was still a creative force producing new work. It all seems so unlikely to have happened at all but it did and I’m so thankful for that.