Made for these Times

It's 37 years since Brian Wilson abandoned the album that would have done for the Beach Boys what Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band (1967) did for The Beatles: Smile. In 1966 Wilson was at the top of his game. Although ostensibly by the Beach Boys, the recently released Pet Sounds (1966) had essentially been a solo album, and hailed as the work of a genius, while 'Good Vibrations' (1966), a recent number one on both sides of the Atlantic, was arguably the most innovative and complex 45 rpm to date. Everyone, it seemed, was hanging on Brian's every move, The Beatles included.

Following a breakdown in 1964, Wilson announced his retirement from the road. While the rest of the Beach Boys performed their back catalogue - gorgeous, exhilarating songs about surfing, custom cars, high school sweethearts, male camaraderie and endless Californian sun - Brian Wilson got down to the serious business of creating revolutionary music from the sounds that played incessantly in his head. He was the complete musician, in command of every step of the creative process: songwriting and performing, arranging and producing. Capitol Records put Los Angeles' finest musicians at his disposal and Wilson's sessions were crowded affairs. The music he was making was essentially outside any known genre: equal parts rock, pop, jazz, folk, Baroque, Gregorian, Minimalist, Dada, Vaudeville, film score and children's song. He would use electric guitars and drums one moment and a full orchestra the next. Intricate melody lines were rendered by saxophones, cellos, harmonicas, accordions, flutes and ukuleles, percussive textures created with chimes, vibraphone, theremin, hammers, saws, water jugs and root vegetables. Jokes, laughter, a train passing, Brian's dogs barking and recordings of the sea all found their way into the mix.

When the Beach Boys returned to Los Angeles to lay down the vocal tracks for Smile, they were alarmed by Brian's new direction. 'Don't fuck with the formula', Mike Love threatened. As a writer of Beach Boys lyrics himself, Love wasn't happy with Wilson's new collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, whose lyrics were as imagistic and layered as the music itself. 'Surf's Up', the album's closing track, was anything but a surf song: 'Dove nested towers, the hour will strike the street quicksilver moon/ Carriage across the fog, two-step, to lamp lights cellar tune' ran one of its verses. Smile subjects included the Pilgrim Fathers, Native Americans and the Old West; theatre, architecture and agriculture; the elements, healthy eating, youth and old age.

The Beach Boys were also concerned about Wilson's increasingly eccentric behaviour. While they were away, he had a giant sandpit installed under his grand piano and the windows of his Bel Air mansion stained grey. He tried to convert friends to vegetarianism while gorging on steaks and cheeseburgers. Meetings with record company executives now took place in his pool, as he thought the house was bugged. He believed his hero Phil Spector was behind Seconds (1966), a Rock Hudson movie that Wilson thought was addressed to him. He'd taken LSD for the first time a year earlier and seen the face of God.

Slowly Smile began to unravel. A legal dispute between the Beach Boys and Capitol, and Parks' resignation after a row with Love, seemed to seal its fate. Eventually Wilson stopped showing up at the studio, and Smile was shelved on the brink of completion (Capitol had even printed 500,000 sleeves). Brian took to his bed for the next three years. The two decades that followed were marked by drug and alcohol abuse, obesity, horrific mental difficulties, creative block and almost complete reclusion. The king of California was reduced to a very rich bum. After a succession of fine but unsuccessful albums in the late 1960s and early '70s, which saw the emergence of Brian's brothers Dennis and Carl as talented songwriters and producers, the Beach Boys went the way of nostalgia acts.

In the intervening years a subculture developed around Smile - there's even a 300-page book devoted to it. We are, after all, talking about what might have been the greatest album of all time (a title often awarded to Pet Sounds). To date, Smile has placed fans in the position of detectives, or what Nicholas Bourriaud calls 'post-producers'. The various bootlegs of the album that circulate clandestinely are the fruit of dedicated research and reconstruction. Although Wilson did give Capitol a handwritten order of songs, the fact that each song was made up of many sections, and that many of those sections remained unsorted, meant that the exact shape of the album has always been a matter of conjecture. All the while Wilson has remained silent on the issue.

Following the success of his Pet Sounds tour in 2002, it was announced that Wilson would be playing Smile live, beginning with a week's residency at London's Royal Festival Hall. A few years ago the idea of seeing him perform live at all would have seemed outlandish. The group of musicians he has assembled, however, are far more than a backing band. Working with them, it seems, has been a therapeutic process, and it is thanks to their commitment to the music that the album has finally been resuscitated. Smile, whose ruins are sublime and traumatic, was always going to be the hardest challenge and biggest prize.

Smile commenced after the interval, and the mood of the concert changed altogether. Gone were the nostalgia and exuberance that attended the first hour or so of greatest hits. With Smile the tense changed from past to present as the audience witnessed the process of a mythical blueprint becoming a fantastic monument. As with jazz and opera, there were few pauses between songs; motifs from one would reappear in altered form some time later. Everyone on stage had a lot to do: musicians changed instrument every half minute or so. Rhythmically the effect of the music was hypnotic and strange, as if the tempo of one's pulse had been tampered with. Voices were used percussively as well as harmonically: a cappella sections were as orchestral as instrumental passages. Whereas Wilson often looks like an absence at the centre of proceedings, during Smile he seemed to be physically willing the music into existence, pulling sounds from musicians with outstretched arms. Hysterical crescendos were followed by lilting tranquillity; sublime melodies would rise from anarchic, insistent rounds. We heard something the radicalism of which still seems unsurpassed.

When it was all over, a standing ovation ensued of a duration few besides Soviet leaders could have received. Wilson looked daunted and a little disturbed, as if frustrated that the applause was preventing him from continuing with the next part of the set. In the 1960s he was convinced that the public 'just wouldn't like' Smile, and that ultimately he had simply written it for himself. Any lingering sense he had that the public had yet to catch up with his art was surely dispelled once and for all in that extraordinary wintry week in London 37 years later.