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Musician and journalist, Bob Stanley interviews Brian Wilson.

The life of Beach Boy is celebrated in an excellent biopic called Love & Mercy which is currently doing the rounds. It concentrates on two key periods of Brian's life: the eighties when his life was in the clammy grip of his doctor and therapist Eugene Landy, and the mid sixties, when his creativity peaked with Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations.

During the summer of 1966, when Pet Sounds was at no.2 on the British album chart, Brian met a young session musician around Hollywood with the exotic name of Van Dyke Parks. “I met Van Dyke at my friend Terry Melcher’s house,” Brian told me back in 2004. “I talked to him for a couple of hours and I said you have a good way with words. You seem to be very poetic, do you think you could write some lyrics? A couple of weeks later we wrote , , . . . it came together very quick.” After toying with the title Dumb Angel, Brian decided the next Beach Boys album would be called Smile.
The key word on Smile was humour — Wilson felt that the moment someone laughed they lost control of themselves, and that moment was a spiritual experience. At the same time, Smile would be an American travelogue, from Plymouth Rock to Diamond Head. Its ambition had no pop precedent.

During the recording, Wilson decided that everybody involved had to be healthy. One night he dumped all of his living room furniture and replaced it with blue tumbling mats. Out of this came the song I’m in Great Shape. “We wanted to create the feeling of being healthy in the morning, paradise in the morning in Hawaii,” he explained to me. “And we had a health food shop, but it went out of business — the Radiant Radish.”

If opening shops as part of the creative process seemed wild, it was nothing alongside a piece of music called Mrs O’Leary’s Cow. Part of a suite called The Elements, representing fire, it was a terrifying atonal cacophony which abruptly ended the good vibrations and tipped Wilson into paranoia. When his fellow band members returned from a fabulously successful tour of Europe to hear what their leader had been up to they were horrified."Don't f**k with the formula" was Mike Love's reaction. Love & Mercy reminds us that Brian's own father, Murray Wilson, began managing and producing a rival soundalike group called the Sunrays.

Brian’s confidence evaporated, Parks split the scene in the face of band hostility towards his evocative lyrics, and Smile was dumped, eventually seeing the light of day as the absorbing Smile Sessions box set in 2011. There’s no doubt that, . Love & Mercy isn't an easy film to watch, but it's very touching - even if you're a Beach Boys fan who knows the story inside out, you won't be disappointed.