Wouldn’t it be nice if we were younger

Wilson has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a psychiatric illness. It scrambles his speech, which is truncated and slurred. Side-effects can include hallucinations, paranoia and delusional thinking. In Wilson’s case the hallucinations are aural, not visual. He famously hears voices, and he has done since the 1960s. Before he was diagnosed, he self-medicated with heroin and cocaine, which of course only made things worse. The voices are cruel and mocking, like that of his brute of a father, Murry, a failed songwriter who resented Brian, his eldest son, for his vastly superior musical talent. Murry has been dead for nearly 40 years, but an echo of his vitriol lives on inside Brian Wilson’s head.

Like many sufferers of schizoaffective disorder, Wilson regulates his mood with antidepressants. Today, however, he seems jittery, especially when I attempt to discuss his personal turmoil. He says he has prepared for the tour by “trying to think good thoughts”. I ask if he believes that his most creative work comes out of unhappiness. “I can’t answer that question,” he says, closing his eyes and, alarmingly, beginning to tremble with distress. “I can’t answer that. I can’t…”

He seems heartbreakingly vulnerable. I have the urge to give him a hug, but that would probably freak him out even more

Well, what about the drugs? And, in particular, LSD, the powerful hallucinogen he took huge quantities of during the 1960s. “It expanded my ability to make music,” he says. “But I regret taking it now.” The voices began during his LSD period. “Things would have been different, for sure.”

Perhaps the reason why Brian Wilson is so unsettled is that he is about to tour with the Beach Boys. He hasn’t done so since December 1964, when he suffered a breakdown triggered by overwork: he was the main songwriter and an extraordinarily gifted producer, but it was the touring that got to him the most.

After the breakdown, Wilson would appear infrequently on stage, and he never toured. Soon after, in a fog of marijuana, Wilson came up with his melancholy masterpiece, Pet Sounds.

Then he graduated to LSD and, though there were flashes of brilliance in the years that followed, he was never the same again. How is he feeling about touring again after so long?

“I’m looking forward to it,” he insists. Any reservations? “No. I want to do the tour. I really do. It’s exciting. They [the rest of the band] are just as easy to work with as they were 30 years ago.”

Surely Wilson’s memory can’t be that bad? The Beach Boys has been one of the most bitterly divided bands of all time. Ironic, given the squeaky-clean image they once projected. But behind the scenes there were fist fights, deep rifts over musical direction and about drugs (half the band took them, the other half didn’t), and a revolving door of managers and hangers-on.

The most notorious of these was Charles Manson, who moved in with Brian’s younger brother, Dennis, with his orgy-loving followers. The Manson family’s brutal murder of the actress Sharon Tate and four others was widely believed to have been a warning to Dennis after he and Manson fell out.

My first glimpse of the surviving bandmates all together comes when they assemble for a group photograph. There are five of them: Brian Wilson; his bellicose cousin Mike Love, the oldest at 71; David Marks, the youngest at 63, who grew up near the Wilsons in the blue-collar LA suburb of Hawthorne; the diminutive Al Jardine, a high-school friend of Wilson’s who nearly chose dentistry over music; and the voluble Bruce Johnston, an adopted child who grew up in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, and who initially joined as a replacement for Brian Wilson on the tours.

Brian’s two younger brothers, Dennis and Carl, died long ago — Dennis after a diving accident in 1983, and Carl of cancer in 1998.

The final rehearsal in Tuscon before showtime (Julian Broad)

We are in Tucson, Arizona, at the open-air amphitheatre where the band will perform the first of a marathon 50-date tour across America. The venue is surrounded by desert. The plan is to cross the car park and photograph the band with the scrubby landscape behind them. We’ve not gone 10 yards when Wilson starts to protest. “We can do it here, right?” he barks at our photographer, Julian Broad. Er, no, Brian, parked cars aren’t a good look. Another 10 yards. “What about here?” It takes an intervention from Wilson’s long-serving manager and PR, Jean, in a stentorian voice, to propel Brian to the end of the car park. He still complains: “I can’t do this. It’s too hot. I’m gonna pass out!”

The rest of the band are giggling like schoolboys, although not unkindly. They line up and pose, still chuckling. And, suddenly, Wilson conjures up a grin. But after the photographer has shot just six frames, Wilson lumbers off. “Okay, that’s enough,” he huffs. This time there’s no stopping him. The Beach Boys were together for fewer than 10 seconds. Hopefully, this is not a metaphor.

After the photographer has shot just six frames, Wilson lumbers off. ‘Okay, that’s enough,’ he huffs

The next time I see Brian Wilson he is alone once more — on his tour bus, a 65ft black-and-gleaming-silver behemoth. I climb aboard with Jeffrey Foskett, Wilson’s musical director on his solo tours — Wilson has rediscovered an appetite for performing live in the past decade or so.

Wilson sits in a reclining chair next to the empty driver’s seat. I say hello as I pass by. His eyes flicker and his face momentarily lights up. It’s peaceful in here, uncluttered, cocooned from the world.

Wilson’s formidable-looking wife, Melinda, who I rarely see without her black sunglasses, doesn’t appear to be on board — despite the fact that she, like Wilson’s manager, Jean, is only accompanying him for a handful of the shows.

For the rest of the time he will rely on Foskett, who seems a gentle soul, to organise his schedule and for company. When he is not required onstage, this is where Brian Wilson will reside, silently absorbed in music that plays quietly from a radio. A quarter-full bottle of tequila sits on the kitchenette counter.

Foskett had intended to play me the new album. There have been no new Beach Boys albums since 1996, and no great ones for a long time before that. But this new one, Foskett tells me, is a return to form for the band. This sounds almost too good to be true, given Wilson’s barely coherent state. However, I will soon be compelled to think again — although not just yet.

Trying to talk to Wilson about the album elicits only fragments of information. It has been “quite an experience”, he tells me — but he can remember only three song titles. The most intriguing is The Private Life of Bill and Sue, apparently a tale of two reality-TV stars who are hounded by the press. “People wonder what they do,” says Brian. “But they have a private life.” Do they manage to hold on to it? “Yeah.” Do any of the other songs tell stories? “I can’t remember.”

Later, the band reassemble backstage. They sit in two rows, to be filmed for their YouTube channel. Brian Wilson reads his link from a cue card behind the camera. He gets it word-perfect first time, and spontaneous applause ripples around the room. I’m picking up good vibrations here. The Beach Boys actually seem to be enjoying each other’s company. When Mike Love affects a cheesy radio-DJ voice for his link, Al Jardine’s shoulders shake with laughter. Not so very long ago, the pair were suing each other over the use of the Beach Boys’ name for their respective touring bands. They finally reached a settlement in 2008, with Love wining the rights to the name.

“All that crap’s water under the bridge,” says Jardine. “We don’t have to like the same food, or the same people, or have the same business interests. When we’re all together, the common denominator is music. That’s our language. We don’t have to agree on anything else.”

Brian Wilson recuperates alone after his interview (Julian Broad)

It’s hard not to wonder whether this can really be the case. Various Beach Boys spent much of the 2000s suing each other — for songwriting credits, royalties, image rights. It wasn’t an edifying spectacle.

“It’s just business,” insists David Marks. “There’s nothing personal in it at all. It was just lawyers back there doing their thing. To the public it looks like a bitter feud, but people need [to see] conflict. It keeps things interesting. But when we get together, everything is resolved.”

Nevertheless, the five surviving Beach Boys have spent recent years in three separate and competing bands. Then, in May last year, relations appeared to thaw. The five were reunited again in an LA recording studio, to be filmed singing an old number, chosen for its apposite title: Do It Again. It was just like old times. “They still sing really good,” says Brian.

For more than a decade, Mike Love has staged up to 150 Beach Boys shows a year. There is online speculation that he is the driving force behind this reunion and that money is the main motive. “I don’t know if I’m the driving force,” he parries. “I think it’s by mutual agreement. It just makes sense to get together and celebrate a pretty remarkable milestone.” Do you mean financial sense? “Oh no, not at all. I actually make more money doing what I do, how I’m doing it. No, it’s to honour the legacy of the Beach Boys.” And maybe it really is that simple. Certainly the ostentatious bling on his fingers, wrists and around his neck does not suggest a man struggling to pay the bills.

Love has grown wearily accustomed to being portrayed as the villain, chiefly for his reported objection to Wilson’s experimentalism on Pet Sounds, and the ill-fated follow-up album, Smile, both of which broke from the commercially proven surf-rock formula.

Various Beach Boys spent much of the 2000s suing each other — for songwriting credits and royalties

“I’ve been painted as the bad guy,” Love shrugs. “I’ve been quoted saying disparaging things about Pet Sounds. It couldn’t be further from the truth. It was a brilliant album.

The conflict was that there were certain people who were into drugs. Such as LSD, heroin, cocaine, uppers, downers, you name it. I won’t mention any Wilsons by name,” he cackles (I suspect he means all three brothers, whose excesses are well documented).

“And then there was Mike Love and Al Jardine, who became teachers of transcendental meditation. It became a them-and-us situation. And there were people around Brian at the time that may have said things… Brian was under the impression that I didn’t like the Smile album.

And I was even blamed for not putting it out. I had nothing to do with that decision. Brian took LSD and shelved it.”

Even so, Love can’t resist taking one last pop at some of the more esoteric lyrics of Van Dyke Parks, the LA hipster with whom Wilson co-wrote Smile (finally released last year, more than 43 years after it was recorded).

“I’d ask him, what the hell does ‘over and over, the crow cries uncover the corn field’ [from the song Cabin Essence] mean?’ All of a sudden it’s like Lewis Carroll came in and wrote the words for the Beach Boys. And Lewis Carroll was no slouch. But for a pop record trying to be successful in the music industry, when you add to it the little element of LSD, you kinda lose me. So I admit to being lost. Lost for words.”

Parks was just one of many songwriting partners from outside the band to have worked with Wilson. The list also includes Tony Asher, an advertising copywriter of all things, who co-wrote songs on Pet Sounds; and, more controversially, Eugene Landy, Wilson’s one-time therapist who helped him quit drugs but then began to exert a Svengali-like control over his life and music. (Landy was eventually charged with professional misconduct and in 1991 had his licence revoked.)

These days Wilson has another creative partner, Joe Thomas, a record and television producer. Thomas is a tall and well-built man in his fifties, with a patient, pleasant demeanour. His account of the Beach Boys’ reunion contains an unexpected plot twist.

As we lie on a grassy bank opposite the stage, Thomas fills me in. He began “palling around” with Wilson in the early 1990s, before working on the latter’s solo album, Imagination, released in 1998. They sat at the piano and, over time, recorded around 800 hours of melodies, from which songs gradually emerged. But Wilson insisted that certain songs would only work if he could record them with the Beach Boys.

This seemed a remote prospect — these were the litigation years — so the songs were shelved. And then, three years ago, Thomas received a phone call. “Hey Joe!” a familiar voice slurred. “Do you know that in Australia, the toilets flush the other way? I just thought you wanted to know that.”

The Beach Boys frontman en route to the stage in Arizona (Julian Broad)

Wilson hung up. It had been the first that Thomas had heard from him for years. He knew Wilson well enough to know that something more than antipodean lavatories was on his mind, but he also knew not to rush things. Six months later, Wilson called again. “Whatever happened to the songs, Joe?” he asked.

Thomas spent weeks trawling the old cassette tapes, and whittling down the best bits into “five or six songs”, which he and Wilson spent 18 months working on. “I just showed up and, after not seeing me for years, he just went, ‘Hey! Let’s go,’ as if three seconds had passed.”

According to Thomas it was Wilson who orchestrated last year’s reunion — a de facto audition to see if the other Beach Boys were still up to it musically. “Brian’s way more switched-on than people give him credit for,” says Thomas. “He doesn’t miss a thing. He’ll close his eyes and everyone will think he’s sleeping, then somebody will tell a joke and one eye will open up and he’ll giggle a bit. But it’s tough, because when you’re Brian Wilson, everybody…” he trails off. “He doesn’t react well to people who get too close too quick.”

Afterwards, the bandmates mostly hang out with their respective families... apart from Wilson, who is straight back on his tour bus

Later, the keyboard player, singer and songwriter Bruce Johnston will explain why. “A lot of people were just greedy to be around Brian and ingratiate themselves,” he says. “Some of the little drug-delivery guys would come to the studio. It was obvious because they were trying to be wallpaper. They were probably saying to Brian that it’ll increase your creativity.”

Nobody can deny that the drugs took a terrible toll on Brian, I reply. But isn’t there a paradox that some of his best work emerged while he was on them?

“I think the wrong people took Brian off the wider path,” Johnston replies. He suddenly looks angry. “By now he would probably have had a shelf-full of Oscars like John Williams [the American composer behind the Star Wars and Jurassic Park film scores]. Those people took away some of his chances.”

If the Beach Boys are nervous before the actual show, they hide it well. Bruce Johnston is back to his gregarious self, regaling me with anecdotes. There’s one about Paul McCartney saying that the cover of Pet Sounds was the worst ever (Johnston agrees — photographed in a petting zoo, the conspicuous goat’s anus in the foreground still makes him wince); and the tale about the infamous sandbox at Brian Wilson’s old house, installed so he could play piano with his feet in the sand, which had to go after Wilson's dogs repeatedly crapped in it.

Mike Love is also on form. He has been meditating, a practice he took up with the Beatles during their famous stay with the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1960s; unlike the Beatles, Love has remained a lifelong devotee. “It’s better than being a raging, crazy person,” he growls, a picture that is not too hard to imagine.

Before taking the stage, the Beach Boys sequester themselves in a small room with Jeffrey Foskett, who will sing Carl Wilson’s parts, and nine backing musicians (it would be too much to expect the five Beach Boys to carry the show on their own at their age). They form a large circle, join hands, and each says a few words — about how much the music means to them, mostly. Barely within earshot, I can’t make out whether Brian speaks.

The show lasts nearly 2½ hours, with an intermission. Wilson floats above it all at his white piano, which is low in the mix, with lyrics displayed for him on a mini autocue. Nevertheless, when his turn comes to sing the lead his voice is in remarkably fine fettle. He even manages a half-smile and a wave as the crowd bellows his name.

Afterwards, the bandmates mostly hang out with their respective families. All apart from Wilson, who is straight back on his tour bus. In fact, he had wandered offstage while the others were still taking a bow.

I never did get to hear the album in Arizona. Back home, the record label gives me a preview. The songs are warmly nostalgic and the trademark harmonies still sound celestial. And, excitingly, hiding at the end is a bona fide Brian Wilson masterwork — a “suite” of four songs linked by key. Each is an intricate pocket symphony, full of sensitive, bittersweet lyrics.

It is Wilson’s isolation that comes across most of all. “Sunlight’s fading and there’s not much left to say,” he sings. “My life, I’m better off alone. My life, I’m better on my own.”

The Beach Boys’ new album, That’s Why God Made the Radio, is released tomorrow on EMI