Is it time to kick some sand in Brian Wilson's face? No one wants to be mean, but it's hard to work out what the audience for a Brian Wilson show in late 2009 really requires from him or what he wants from them.
It has been the better part of a decade since he returned from his psychic wanderings, looking pretty shaken up, but stern of jaw, playing Pet Sounds live for the first time and then his "lost" masterpiece Smile (he'd dropped it down the back of a sofa along with a ham sandwich in 1967). The adulation that greeted him at those shows was quite overwhelming, for the fans as much as for Wilson himself, completing as they did the narrative arc of one of rock's most fabled stories. Whatever the charms of last year's album, That Lucky Old Sun, it didn't suggest that there was another chapter left to write, and given that he's now no stranger to the touring circuit, there seems little point or purpose to his appearances.
This sounds cruel, but as soon as he started with "Do It Again", the suspicion set in that this 67-year-old perpetual adolescent was simply going through the motions. Sitting behind a keyboard, he barely touched the keys; he took sips between songs from a mug containing... what? More likely Ovaltine than the elixir of youth. It felt as if his mind was elsewhere for much of the time – not lost in some stoned perambulation, but perhaps thinking still of his favourite Ben and Jerry's flavour (Chubby Hubby? Something more patriotic like Yes, Pecan?). He looked most like the wax-headed "auto-icon" of Jeremy Bentham that belongs in the cloisters of University College, London.
The philosophy that the Beach Boys advocated – in a nutshell: have fun, fun, fun, until Daddy takes the T-Bird away – was represented through "Surfin' USA", "California Girls", "Little Deuce Coupe" and more. It could have been that the audience was there to pay homage to these early classics, the greatest advertisements ever for the American way of life or perhaps, to the cynical, sales pitches for the Californian economy, which grew to be the seventh largest in the world to a Beach Boys soundtrack. But the T-Bird has been taken away, because Daddy can't afford the gas, and the economy's down in the dumps, and the promise and the optimism that the Golden State's poster boys once represented now looks tarnished. It felt slightly perverse to take much pleasure in these songs.
Besides, the Beach Boys' early music was rock'n'roll for tightly sweatered teens; very few of those looked to be present at the Roundhouse. Introducing "Do You Wanna Dance?", one of the band members scanned the standing, squashed crowd and said: "This is the part where we normally ask people to get up and dance!" But no one did.
Towards the end of the 60s, when Charles Manson was hanging out with Dennis Wilson, and Brian started smoking Hawaiian pot, the band's horizons expanded. It's hard to overstate the influence that Beach Boys music from this period has had on today's new psychedelic turns such as Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear. But though the 11-piece band backing Brian in London were still the Wondermints (albeit with some changes in personnel) – the same group who helped create the Smile live shows – there wasn't any place on the 38-song setlist for the likes of "Cabin Essence" or "Mrs O'Leary's Cow".
Even so, the world's greatest curmudgeon would have his heart melted by those songs that always seemed more personal to Wilson and which did feature. These included not only "In My Room" (1963) and "God Only Knows" (1966) but also – coming out the other side of his physical and psychic retreat – "Soul Searchin'" (1996) and "Your Imagination" (1998), the theme being Brian's vulnerability.
It's true that he could never surf and Brian Wilson was never the beach bully. Closing the show was a beautiful "Love and Mercy", his great plea for us all to show some empathy. Perhaps it would be fairest to put this show down as nothing more than one bad gig.
