Brian Wilson, the troubled genius who turned his demons into miracles ...Middle East

If ever a story summed up the troubled genius of Brian Wilson, it is his 1967 appearance on Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, a US documentary hosted by Leonard Bernstein to showcase pop’s evolution into a serious artform. In among debate and other artists playing songs, Wilson gives a stunning performance of one his best, most beautiful, saddest pieces, “Surf’s Up!” to cement his reputation as “the Mozart of Pop”.

But the programme had originally intended to be a film just about Wilson himself, after his 1966 symphonic opus Pet Sounds – arguably the greatest album ever made – took popular music to new heights. Except the plan was shelved when producers couldn’t work with Wilson, deeming him non-verbal and unable to communicate in any meaningful way, his drug intake and mental health issues beginning to take hold.

Wilson’s obsessive genius and deliberating mental health issues were ultimately a burden he could barely overcome. But The Beach Boys mastermind, who has died aged 82, managed to turn his inner demons into miraculous, beautiful music like no other.

With his wonderful tenor voice and unerring way with melody, Wilson took pop to new frontiers with complex, harmonious songs (helped by fellow Beach Boys brothers Carl and Dennis, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnson) and groundbreaking studio techniques.

Wilson was the only member of The Beach Boys who couldn’t surf, but nevertheless effortlessly captured the effervescence of Californian youth that made The Beach Boys synonymous with their hometown like few bands ever. From 1962 for five years, songs came like the Californian waves – “I Get Around”, “Surfin’ USA”, “Fun Fun Fun” – that by 1964 were becoming more elaborate: “Don’t Worry Baby” was Wilson’s take on his hero Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound production. Wilson’s experiments with drugs – particularly LSD – was intensifying, yet also raising his songwriting to new levels. “California Girls” – his favourite Beach Boys song – was conceived during an acid trip.

Yet a melancholy always lay behind the good time hits on lonely, heartbreaking ballads like “In My Room” and “Surfer Girl”. Wilson had been born in Inglewood, California, in 1942 where he and his brothers grew up loving early rock’n’roll and doo wop; his father Murry, a failed musician, was a violent man: Wilson was deaf in one ear from the childhood beatings.

It was a sadness he couldn’t shake. Wilson struggled with fame and quit touring with The Beach Boys after an in-flight panic attack in December 1964. But he used the time to retreat to the studio, a friendly creative rivalry with The Beatles spurring both bands to greater heights: Wilson’s response to hearing Rubber Soul was to make Pet Sounds, his elaborate masterpiece. Paul McCartney declared the hymnal “God Only Knows” his favourite ever song; The Beatles’ next move was to make Revolver.

Wilson then made his greatest creation “Good Vibrations”, a work of staggering complexity that took months to perfect. But Wilson’s psyche could not handle his increasing hallucinogenic drug intake, making him hear voices in his head, nor his obsessive perfectionism. In 1967 he began work on his “teenage symphony to God”, an album called Smile that was abandoned when Wilson had a nervous breakdown. Smile gained mythical status as the greatest lost album of all time.

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Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson dies aged 82

But it did irrepressible damage to its creator. Wilson took to his bed for years, eventually diagnosed with bipolar schizoaffective disorder. As his drug use spiralled in the early 70s, his contributions to The Beach Boys were sporadic; his 80s were defined by his relationship with Eugene Landy, the disgraced psychologist who drugged and manipulated Wilson into subservience. Wilson was eventually saved when he met his wife Melinda Ledbetter. Wilson wrote his best-known solo song, the gorgeous “Love and Mercy”, in 1988.

The 90s brought acrimonious Beach Boys lawsuits, but in the noughties came the unlikeliest of revivals. In 2002, he returned to touring to perform Pet Sounds in its entirety to awed audiences, inadvertently kick-starting the album-in-full touring industry. To much surprise and excitement, he then finally finished Smile in 2004.

Wilson spent the last 20 years touring with regularity, despite the fact on stage he often seemed vacant, his superb band doing the heavy lifting. In my encounter with him in 2016, he was unable to answer questions in anything other than childlike, short, one sentence responses familiar to anyone who watched recent documentary Long Promised Road. Due to a “major neurocognitive disorder” he was placed into a conservatorship following the death of Melinda in January 2024.

And it is Wilson’s legacy that a man who withstood so much sadness – including the death of Dennis and Carl – produced a songbook of rare beauty that can rival anyone; the troubled pop genius for whom mere “pop” is not adequate enough a word.

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