Speaking ahead of his performance at Camp Bestival next month, pop visionary BRIAN WILSON tells THE GUIDE how music was the best therapy for him

BEACH Boys star Brian Wilson will bring the curtain down on the tenth Camp Bestival this summer.

Wilson will present classic album Pet Sounds in its entirety, plus his greatest hits. Universally hailed as one of pop music's most important recordings, Brian will be bringing his majestic masterpiece to Camp Bestival for a headline sunset performance.

Wilson says that Pet Sounds, the classic album he made with the Beach Boys 50 years ago, made a lot of people happy.

As a shimmering pop record, Pet Sounds is virtually unrivalled. A strong melody doesn’t age, and songs like God Only Knows, Sloop John B and Wouldn’t It Be Nice have become timeless gems. To listen to these carefully crafted hits is, for younger listeners in particular, to feel a warm nostalgia for a time not even experienced first-hand. When Wilson plays Pet Sounds in full at Camp Bestival, strong emotions will surely be stirred across the generations.

In some quarters, the record is figuratively thought of as a Brian Wilson solo effort. After a panic attack on a plane to Houston in 1964, he told the band, “Listen, I’m going to have to quit the touring group. But it’s going to be well worth it, because I’m going to write you some good songs.” He has since said that he had a feeling he was in the process of “making a legendary album.”

Working in tandem with lyricist Tony Asher, Pet Sounds was delivered in a creative flurry in Los Angeles. While Wilson was meticulous about the sound he wanted to construct, sometimes requiring 30 takes to be satisfied with even very small sections of songs, God Only Knows was written in just 45 minutes.

Wilson’s instinctive ear for a winning pop hook, together with his technical innovation – he employed bicycle bells and Coca-Cola cans as well as more traditional instruments in the studio – mean he is now considered one of the most talented and visionary songwriters of all time.

“As soon as I heard The Beatles, I was inspired to make a great album,” he says, clarifying his perception that Pet Sounds would be seminal. Not everyone shared this view, however – including the rest of the original band: brothers Dennis and Carl, cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine.

“When they came back to LA, they didn’t like the album at first, but they liked it after a while,” remembers Wilson. “It wasn’t commercial to them. The boys didn’t think so, but the public thought so.”

“When I first made Pet Sounds I thought God Only Knows was the best song on the album.” Does he still think that? “Yeah.” Wouldn’t It Be Nice is his other eternal favourite.

Beneath the West Coast sheen of much of The Beach Boys’ music, and like 1960s California from which Pet Sounds was born, a darkness lurked. The stories of both the band and Wilson himself are marked by disturbing episodes and pain, which Wilson has written about in a memoir – I Am Brian Wilson. The highs and lows of his life have been well-documented, most recently through Bill Pohlad’s 2014 film Love & Mercy, which Wilson has called ‘very factual.’ Wilson’s father Murry, sometime manager of the band, habitually beat his children. “When I watched my father fly into a rage and take swings at me and my brothers, was that shaping or scarring?” wonders Brian in an excerpt from the book.

“Me and my brothers hadn’t had a good childhood, but we all sang together and then we did In My Room (The Beach Boys’ 1962 single) which started us off,” says Wilson.

Wilson’s mental health problems and drug abuse led to him stepping back from the creative controls of the band, having up to then been its songwriting driving force.

In 1976, Wilson’s first wife Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford enlisted the help of psychotherapist Eugene Landy, who would go on to control almost every aspect of the singer’s life, keeping him under 24-hour surveillance until a court order in 1992 legally distanced the two men. Landy had misdiagnosed the voices in Wilson’s head as paranoid schizophrenia, a verdict later retracted.

The singer is haunted by hallucinations, which, as his long-standing current wife Melinda told The Washington Post in 2007, are easy to spot once you can see the signs.

“He’ll just get that look and you know the voices are bombarding him,” she said. “He’ll have a voice telling him, ‘You’re terrible, I’m going to kill you.’ And then it’ll go away. But that’s Brian. That will always be Brian.” In the same interview, Wilson said he had “lived a very, very difficult, haunted life.”

The extract from I Am Brian Wilson sees him touch on the suffering he has experienced at various points.

“For me, when I think back across my own life, there are so many things that are painful. Sometimes I don’t like discussing them. Sometimes I don’t even like remembering them.”

Wilson says he wrote the memoir because he wanted to tell his story.

“I wanted to tell my life story; what I went through in my childhood, the records, The Beach Boys – everything. I wanted people to know about my life. I wanted to put the story straight, because the other book wasn’t factual.”

He’s talking about Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story, the 1991 autobiography that Wilson later disowned. Reviewing it, music journalist Nick Kent remarked that “the most disturbing aspect of the text was the way Brian’s story was suddenly hijacked in the middle and turned into an unsolicited testimonial to the miraculous healing powers and all-round good guy qualities of flat-out genius Eugene Landy.”

If Kent speculates on the all-encompassing methods of Landy in this verdict, Wilson seems to confirm his mistreatment at the hands of the doctor today by saying that “the most difficult part (of writing the memoir) was the Dr Landy part. That was the worst of it.” He doesn’t expand further on this, but he is slightly more willing to discuss his past drug use, and the reasons for documenting it in the memoir.

“I took drugs, and I wrote about how the drugs damaged my brain. I wanted to write so people would understand what I went through.”

Does he want to warn his fans of these harmful effects, then? “Yes, I want them to be careful not to use them.”

The knowledge that his work has soundtracked the lives of several generations across the world must be almost overwhelming. “Well, it makes me feel very good,” he says. “People love the Pet Sounds album.”

*Brian Wilson, Camp Bestival, Lulworth Castle, Dorset, July 27 to 30. See campbestival.net