I watched a DVD of Brian Wilson playing Pet Sounds in London ---four sold-out shows at London's Royal Festival Hall---the other night. That series of concerts with the Wondermints was back in 2002. The DVD of Wilson's first solo tour of Europe and England, does not have the first half of the show --the Beach Boy hits and Wilson's songs.

At the time it was unclear whether Wilson was capable of pulling off a live re-creation of the Beach Boys' 1966 album, 'Pet Sounds', which had been mainly written by himself and Tony Asher. Pet Sounds is probably the first pop-rock record to be wholly conceived as a complete experience, a self-contained album that broke away from the hits-plus-filler affairs that characterized most of the rock albums up to that time. The "pocket symphonies," were inspired by the production style of Phil Spector (Ronettes, Crystals, etc.), and used some of Spector's "Wall of Sound" crew to infuse pop music with a naked emotional content.richly symphonic sound. Conventional keyboards and guitars were combined with exotic touches of orchestrated strings, bicycle bells, buzzing organs, harpsichords, flutes, theremin, Hawaiian-sounding string instruments, Coca-Cola cans, barking dogs, and more.

So the concert was a very emotional occasion--B'rian is back.' Would it be disappointment -the familar response to all of the Beach Boys’ recordings after Pet Sounds? Would Wilson's shattered confidence be overcome? Would Wilson deliver?

This was not an aging veteran revisiting his glory years in a live setting. It was touch and go with the early songs---Wouldn't It Be Nice , You Still Believe in Me , That's Not Me. This was not the Beach Boys revisited, and though Wilson's voice had dipped a couple of octaves, they began to breathing new life into "Let's Go Away for Awhile", "Sloop John B", "God Only Knows and "Caroline, No" with waves of affection and applause greeting each song. It was a most moving live event, and I presume , a lot of tears were shed, unashamedly.

The concert did not sound like listening to a newly remastered version of the real thing--a perfect note for note rendition of the original record. Wilson's songs were (for the most part) structurally very simple , but were overlaid with extremely complex and often highly chromatic vocal and instrumental arrangements. Pet Sounds, which can be interpreted to be Brian Wilson's first solo album , had been a commercial disappointment but it was also critically lauded and embraced within the musical community.

This is no trip down memory lane. Ihe music sounded energised, vital, current. The melancholy at the heart of Pet Sounds came to the fore and it was impossible not to listen to the songs and not relate the themes of love, loneliness, abandonment and creative frustration to Wilson's long dark night:---his mental deterioration, eventual breakdown, and his long years of schizophrenia or bipolar affective disorder. The songs still retain their magic--- in fact the rendition of the Pet Sounds instrumental track was better than the original--with a whole a new depth of sensitivity.

Even all these years later, Pet Sounds sounds fresh and dynamic. It challenges the way we now experience culture as disposable music, or the customized consumption of goods and services with which we are already familiar or the average spoon-fed nostalgia fest.

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