Brian Wilson, Royal Festival Hall, London
***1/2

There are currently three incarnations of the Beach Boys doing the rounds, but whilst two of them are essentially ignored by the public eye, songwriter and Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson’s arrival on British shores has induced wild praise and hysteria. Legions of fans are queuing to honour his outstanding contribution to music, eager to embrace what may well be our last chance to hear him actually play through his historic back-catalogue of hits. Further to this, the resurrection of ‘Smile’, the infamous lost Beach Boys album, shelved after Wilson had a nervous breakdown, has generated a significant level of added interest, resulting in the original two London dates eventually being extended to a gargantuan twelve.

With expectations running so incredibly high, the crowd at tonight’s show simply refuse to allow themselves to be disappointed – for them, sharing a room with a musical legend of such epic force is impressive enough, for him to throw in a few hits is regarded as a bonus. It is a celebration of all that the Beach Boys achieved and serves as a touching tribute to the free-spirited era from which they came.

But, history aside, is the show any good? Backed by a ten-strong band and a five-piece string section, all equally enamoured as the awe-struck audience, the collaborative level of musical prowess is of the highest order. With the band huddled around Wilson, the show opens with a semi-unplugged recital of lesser-known Beach Boys tracks, engaging a reflective tone. With the audience now hushed, it’s an early opportunity to consider the complexity of Wilson’s musical arrangements, the beautiful harmonies and the serenity with which they are performed. Living in a time where gaunt rock stars sell themselves as brands and a band’s success relies on their ability to be pigeonholed and collected by fans like Pokémon cards, being reminded of a time where people were more interested in love than fashion, passion than pretence, art than the King Of Leon’s new haircuts and genuinely believed that they could use music to change the world fills you with sad wisdom and a longing for a return of the hope and idealism that modern life is so dearly lacking. With this considered, the auditorium’s sickly smell of sycophantic fan-worship seems instantly justified. ‘California Girls’, ‘Sloop John B’ and the tender ‘God Only Knows’ punctuate the first half of the show, receiving across-the-board standing ovations from every proprietor of a seat in the grand Royal Festival Hall.

Wilson himself, now 62, is a fascinating specimen to watch. As tonight is a celebration of momentous achievements and times past, it’s easy to overlook the harsh truths of the present. He was undoubtedly a genius of his generation, for which he should never be forgotten, but in 2004 Brian Wilson is, well, just a very old man who has to read the lyrics of the songs he is performing off a badly-disguised auto-cue. A guilty pleasure of watching the performance is in attempting to gauge just how madly imbalanced he has become after a lifetime of substance abuse and fluctuating emotional fortunes and hardships. Despite the occasional coherent banter, we’re submitted to a fair helping of garbled nonsense about pilgrims and such, to which it is hard to respond with anything other than a polite grin, in the same way you do when your grandmother farts without realising at the dinner table on Christmas Day. Sporting the Ozzy Osbourne tracksuit chic, the similarities between the two become apparent. If Ozzy is the Prince of Darkness then Brian is the Prince of Light. They’re both musical icons and they’ve both gone completely cuckoo. It’s a little sad to see a once zestful and inspiring figure re-surface grey, over-weight and aged – as his frail voice struggles to hit high notes it’s a stark reminder that everyone gets old and that, whether we can accept it or not, even the highly revered shall fade. It seems that no matter how unfathomably grand an accomplishment you might have made, eventually it’ll just become a distant part of history, to which it is impossible to ever fully return. Wilson relies on his backing band a whole lot more than they’re given credit for – despite writing all the music that is rendered this evening he has trouble performing it. The second half of the show, before the encore, proves to be a particular struggle as he sings wildly out of tune, pushing his vocal chords to sing notes they can no longer reach, occasionally losing track of the auto-cue and forgetting lyrics all together. Thankfully, the high proficiency level of the musicians that surround him catch his fall and his wavering consistency does not greatly detract from the overall impact of the music.

The second half of the show is dedicated to ‘Smile’, the most famous record that was never made. After releasing 1966’s acclaimed ‘Pet Sounds’, now widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time, Wilson set out to follow it up with a wildly ambitious album, a climatic “teenage symphony to God”. As his scope for the ‘Smile’ project became wider and wider, the other members of the band became disillusioned with his grand ideas, worried they’d lose their audience and credibility, ending their careers. Personal pressures mounted and the tortured production process came to a head in May 1967 when Wilson heard the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band”. Overwhelmed by the majesty of the record he became dispirited with his own and eventually scrapped ‘Smile’ all together. Thirty-six years later it’s announced he shall be finishing it – a mediation as brash as his decision to scrap it in the first place. From the one listen of the finished album that tonight’s show allows, it’s hard to make any undisputable decisions as to whether it really was the troubled masterpiece it had gone down in history as being (or indeed not being), but it is possible to get an impression. To hear ‘Surf’s Up’, ‘Heroes and Villains’ and the sublime ‘Good Vibrations’, all subsequently released as singles after the collapse of the original ‘Smile’ sessions, re-integrated into the textured landscape of this mini-symphony is a fascinating revelation, the record as a whole coming across as a profound document of undulating teenage emotion, conceptually based on the elements.

The show’s extended encore runs though the Beach Boys classics that haven’t already been squeezed into the two and a half hour performance: ‘Barbara Ann’; ‘I Get Around’: ‘Fun Fun Fun’ and ‘Surfin’ USA’ to name but a few. Yet most would be reluctant to admit that, despite putting on a great show that went out with a bang, the whole evening’s tinged with an element of sadness, focussed largely on the inevitable passage of time. For thousands it is a chance to finally hear ‘Smile’ in all its re-awakened glory, but the circumstances around its disappearance and the fact that we never got to hear it the first time round are hard to ignore. However, ending with the poignant ‘Love & Mercy’, we are blessed with a sense of genuine hope for the future and are able to feel thankful one last time for what he has given. With all things considered – tonight Brian Wilson came, he saw and he ultimately conquered. God only knows where we’d be without him.