One One Wonderful

Beauty in music. That's what it's all about for me. At the minute. There's plenty of room for anger and pubescent shouting, self pity, macho bellowing. Just not here for now. Well I say plenty of room...

My first blog post is about beauty and how Brian Wilson & the Beach Boys bring that to life. Last night I watched a doc on Sky Arts called Endless Harmony. It was a bit crap to be honest in terms of narrative but it did have a lot of phenomenal footage of the Beach Boys live and in the studio.

I must thank my erstwhile friend and colleague Craig Robinson for making me take the Beach Boys seriously. Well not seriously exactly as I did own Pet Sounds, Smiley Smile, a Best Of, and Love You (though I didn't listen to Love You very often). I did take them seriously, I just didn't realise the depth & breadth of their genius. We were working at a music sales company - we would call up independent record stores (I am contractually obliged to say 'remember them?' at this point) and try to sell them our (often) shoddy wares. In any office where there's a lot of nerdy, anal men, there's usually a good deal of one-upmanship and cooler-than-thou. That said, it was a fun place to work while it lasted and we got drunk together a lot. Occasionally on free beer at 'swanky music industry parties'. It was the golden days of Britpop.

Anyway we talked about music a lot in that place, and when I was getting to know Craig I asked him who his favourite band were. At that time my faves were Public Enemy, Kraftwerk, Black Sabbath and probably Primal Scream - all great bands of course but perhaps a little boy-ish. He answered 'The Beach Boys'. (you must've seen that coming, right?) Whilst I knew Pet Sounds was a Classic (TM) I really couldn't believe that they could be any 20-something's favourite band in 1996. But Craig seemed like a smart chap .

In fact, Craig turned out to be a very smart chap, by getting out of music and into design, running his own website, and seemingly making a living from making pixel models of pop stars, celebrities, & footballer - minipops. His http://www.flipflopflyin.com/ site is genius, if you like eccentric English witterings, and post modern .... hmmm postmodern-something or other.

So anyway I thought that I must properly listen to the Beach Boys - albums like Sunflower, Holland, Surf's Up. The 'post peak, post Brian's breakdown' albums, when Carl Wilson came into his own. And I realise that Craig was right. The Beach Boys were amazing. Their music spoke to the soul (not that I believe I have one), church music with all that religion stripped away.

Here's a couple of tracks from that era. Wonderful should have been on the famously scrapped Smile album, and ended up on the Smiley Smile scraps album in an inferior version. Here's the original version

http://www.zshare.net/audio/54233126b2d4dbe7/

When Girls Get Together is taken from another scrapped album - Landlocked from 1970

http://www.zshare.net/audio/542292337f4cf10f/

If you're not moved by the beauty of these, you're wrong