Brian Wilson Out Of His Room

On the eve of his UK tour in September, Kingsley Abbott takes a look at Brian Wilson’s solo stuff

The early years of the 21st Century have witnessed the amazing resurgence of onetime Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, achieving a status befitting of his achievements back in the 60s and putting him on a par with all the other major artists from that era. This has been achieved in the main through his live performances, where with his fabulous band he has recreated the Pet Sounds album, finally managed to produce a version of the legendary Smile album, and continued to tour and revisit some dusty corners of his earlier output.

Strangely however, for a man who was the master of the recorded art in his first coming, his recent studio-recorded canon has been patchier, varying from the sublime to the somewhat questionable.

After a protracted and famed period of reclusive withdrawal during the 70s and 80s, Brian Wilson was the artist that so many fans wanted to see return to his previous personal and professional form. The Beach Boys themselves had tried to engineer it in 1976 with the much-trumpeted ‘Brian Is Back’ campaign that saw an illat- ease group leader wandering around stages in a distracted manner and playing keyboard parts that sometimes bore little similarity to the song the others were playing.

It wasn’t until the late 80s that Brian Wilson properly re-emerged with his first official eponymous solo album. At …

by Kingsley Abbott
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