‘I just can't write songs. And it's killing me': My devastating day with Brian Wilson

Telegraph

2 days ago

When I interviewed Brian Wilson at his home in Beverly Hills in 2001 he was in the midst of a comeback from a time in his life that had threatened not only to end his career but possibly to end his life.
But now, freed at last from the baleful influence of Dr Eugene Landy, the psychiatrist who for more than 10 years had controlled his behaviour – and his money – Wilson was deemed capable enough to begin touring, performing in its entirety the record that stands among the greatest pop albums of all time, Pet Sounds.
Music is just one thread woven into the tapestry of our memories and for me the songs of Brian Wilson weave a uniquely colourful and evocative thread.
The first Brian Wilson song I remember hearing was Surf City. It was actually co-written with Jan Berry and recorded in 1963 by Jan and Dean. I was 14. I had no idea Wilson was the co-writer – no idea who Brian Wilson was – but the song, with the promise in its very first line of 'two girls for every boy' conjured a picture of California as the teenage Jerusalem – a vista of sun, sea and surf and sand.
It was a picture that Beach Boy songs would come to define, and then transcend, songs about love, lost and found, coming to terms with life and who you are – songs that I'd return to again and again, never imagining for one moment that I would one day be sitting with the man who created them in his home in Beverly Hills.
I had been cautioned that for Wilson conversation with strangers was an ordeal. It would not be easy. And it wasn't. When I arrived he was sitting on a sofa, clutching a cushion to his chest as if it was a life-raft. When I asked, how are things? he forced a strained smile and glanced at his wrist-watch. A man who having nearly drowned had risen to the surface but was still struggling for breath.
Gradually he opened up, talking about the threads of music that made up his own memories. The more he talked the more animated he became, about his childhood, his brothers, his father who brutalised him, what music meant to him, how drugs had almost destroyed him, how his wife Melinda had saved him.
He talked about Phil Spector, 'a major God'. He regarded Be My Baby as the greatest record ever made, and played it every day, and in tribute wrote Don't Worry Baby for the Ronettes – but fearing Spector would reject it, recorded it with the Beach Boys instead. Spector's loss.
The following year I interviewed Spector and told him how Wilson idolised him. 'I know, I know, I know.' He shrugged. 'But I don't know if you can feel sorry for untalented people. Maybe he's not that talented.''When I told him that Wilson had talked of perhaps wanting to be produced by Spector, he smiled and said the idea was preposterous. Spector had an abundance of gifts, but graciousness was not one of them.
At one point in the interview he began to flag and Wilson fell silent. I asked if he would mind sitting at the piano for a while. He nodded, put his cushion aside, rose from the sofa, and let me upstairs to his music room.
He sat at the piano and played the first bars of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, a piece of music he said he'd always loved. Then he played the opening chords of something that was utterly familiar, a thread woven into the tapestry of my memories, and began to sing. 'I may not always love you, as long as there are stars above you…'
I felt like crying.
This interview was originally published in 2001
Around six each evening, Brian Wilson climbs the winding staircase in his Bel Air mansion to his music room, and sits down at the piano. As the sun goes down behind him, towards the beach, Wilson starts to play. The pieces are always the same. He plays Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, a piece of music that has never failed to move him, and he plays Be My Baby, the epic pop anthem produced by Phil Spector.
This is the song that has obsessed Wilson for more than 40 years: the most perfect pop song ever written, he will tell you; the summation of the pop alchemist's art. It is the yardstick by which, for years, he measured his own mercurial and fragile genius, crafting some of pop music's most blissful hits. But now Brian Wilson is 59, and the songs won't come.
'I'm not getting anywhere,' he says. And again: 'I'm not getting anywhere. I've got writer's block. I just can't seem to write a song.'
So you sit down at the piano and... 'Nothing happens. Just a bunch of chords and bulls---t. But no song melodies. I've run dry. My well's run dry.'
I'm sure it hasn't, I say, and a look of pain passes across his face. 'But it has.'
Was there ever a situation when the water was flowing freely? 'Yeah, when I was inspired. But I haven't been as inspired lately.'
And where did that inspiration come from?
He pauses for seconds that seem like minutes. 'From God,' he says at last.
So it was as if God was speaking through you? 'In a way, yes. He was expressing through me.' And how did that make you feel? 'It made me proud that He would choose me to write music through. It made me very proud. Yeah, it did.'
And why do you think the inspiration has stopped? 'That is a good question.' Wilson pauses. 'I don't know why.' He shakes his head sadly. 'And it's killing me.'
Pondering the moment when he reached his peak as a creative artist, Brian Wilson ventures that it was likely 'some time around the late Sixties'. That is certainly the time when his life began to go horribly wrong.
The creativity and energy which had produced countless Beach Boys hits, and which had made Wilson the most credible American rival to Lennon and McCartney, stuttered to a halt, and another, darker chapter began. These were the years of drug abuse and binge eating, which saw Wilson inflate to 340lb, so enormous he could barely walk without risking cardiac arrest; the years of therapy under the psychiatrist Dr Eugene Landy, whose control over Wilson was so total it finally took a court order to banish Landy from his life. These were the years, as Wilson readily admits, when he was overwhelmed by madness.
Later this month he will be performing a series of concerts in Britain and Ireland. It will be the first time he has set foot on a British stage since 1978, when he appeared with the Beach Boys at Wembley Stadium. At that time, Wilson was at his nadir; bloated and bewildered, a physical and mental wreck who, as one observer noted, seemed to be 'not entirely conversant with the numbers being played'.
Few who witnessed him then would have laid favourable odds on Wilson seeing out the decade, let alone returning in triumph more than 20 years later. Yet in the past three years he has been performing more than at any time in his life. Last year he toured America with an orchestra, performing his album masterpiece, Pet Sounds, in its entirety. Audiences have been greeting his arrival on stage with standing ovations. 'It's like in Peter Pan,' says David Leaf, Wilson's biographer and friend for 25 years, 'when Tinkerbell is dying and the audience are asked to clap their hands, and Tinkerbell comes to life. Well, Brian has been brought to life.'
Before I met Wilson, several people acquainted with him gave me advice. Conversation with strangers, it was suggested, was an ordeal. I was told that I should keep my questions short, lest his attention wander, and that where possible I should avoid asking questions that could be answered with a simple 'yes' or 'no'; that he was uncomfortable talking about the past or his period with Dr Landy; that he tired easily. If he was comfortable he might talk for as much as 45 minutes; and if not, for as little as 15.
Wilson lives with Melinda, his wife of six years, in a newly built faux-Spanish mansion, behind electric gates on an exclusive estate in Bel Air, high in the hills above Hollywood. When I arrive, the Wilsons' two adopted daughters are sitting in the front garden playing with the maid. Melinda is elsewhere. I am ushered through the marbled hall into a spacious lounge, offering views out on to a patio and the mountains beyond. The house is spotless, the air curiously freeze-dried.
Brian Wilson is seated on a leather sofa. He is wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt and white slacks. He is clutching a cushion to his chest as if it were a life-raft, and staring into the mid-distance. He turns his head to acknowledge the fact that I'm in the room, and reaches out to shake my hand without standing up. I sit down on an adjacent sofa, and tell him what a privilege it is for me to meet him, how I've always loved his music.
'That's really great,' he says.
So, I ask, how are things? He forces a strained smile and glances at his wristwatch.
He is a gracious man, his eagerness to please apparent, but the years of problems have left their mark. His posture is rigid, unmoving, as if he is straining to remain stable on a heeling boat. He answers questions in a clipped manner, seldom volunteering any more than is asked for. While his recall of some events (the month of the year a certain record was recorded, who sang what) is unerringly sharp, there are whole areas of his past which he appears not to remember, or perhaps chooses not to remember.
Sometimes, responding to a question, he will cock his head sharply to one side and say, 'Again, please.' He has been deaf in his right ear since childhood, a disability variously attributed to an untreated infection, or having being smacked on the head by his father when he was a baby. It is one of the many plangent minor chords in Wilson's life that one of pop music's greatest producers has never been able to hear his own music in stereo.
'My favourite thing was always the voices,' he says. 'Hearing the combination of voices and the instruments. But the voices are my favourite part of the record. Always. And I think people liked our records because our voices carried love in them, you know? Our voices are what makes love come alive. And it was the love in the music that hooked people in.'
In the beginning there were just three brothers, raising their voices around a piano in their home in the LA suburb of Hawthorne. Brian was the eldest, then Dennis, then Carl. They were joined by a cousin, Mike Love, and a family friend, Al Jardine. At first they were called the Pendletones, after a make of sports shirt. The name was changed to the snappier Beach Boys by a record industry player who had heard their first single, Surfin'.
The Wilsons' father, Murry, was a machinery salesman and frustrated songwriter who lived out his dreams through his sons, and punished them for his own failures. All the boys were frequently beaten, but it was for Brian, the most gifted, that Murry reserved his most sadistic behaviour. One story tells of his being forced to defecate on a newspaper in front of the family in order to humiliate him.
Murry was the group's first manager. His ultimate act of cruelty was to appropriate the copyrights to his son's songs, and then, in 1969, to sell them for $700,000, convinced that the group was 'finished'. Brian didn't see a penny. 'It killed him,' his first wife, Marilyn, would later remember. (In 1992, Wilson won a settlement of $10 million from AlmoIrving Music, which had purchased the songs from his father. The catalogue's total worth is now estimated at more than $20 million.)
Childhood is one of the places Wilson doesn't like to go. 'I had a rough one,' he says simply. 'My dad was cruel.' But does he think he'd have become the songwriter he did without Murry pushing him? 'Oh, no! No, no. He was largely responsible for my attitude; very much part of my career. He whipped us.' Wilson pauses. 'A little too hard. We had to fire him in the end.'
And how did Murry feel about that? 'He was upset. He didn't know what to do. He started to cry. We said we don't want you to cry; but we can't get along with you. You're too hard on us. I think he understood in the end.'
Wilson approached his craft with Stakhanovite vigour. Between 1962 and 1965 the group recorded an astonishing 11 albums, all written and produced by Brian. Songs such as Fun, Fun, Fun, I Get Around and California Girls provided a template of California as the teenage Jerusalem, a place of endless sunshine and carefree youthful exuberance. But the truth was that Wilson was socially awkward, withdrawn, at ease only at his piano or in the recording studio. Joe Sutton, the Beach Boys' first PR man, vividly remembers the group in their first flush of fame. Dennis, he says, was the party animal; Carl was sweet; Brian 'scared'.
In 1964 he married for the first time. He was 22; Marilyn was 16. A week later, buckling under the intense pressure of writing, recording and touring, Wilson suffered his first breakdown, on a flight to Houston to begin a tour. While he would make the occasional appearance on stage with the group, he would never undertake a full tour with the Beach Boys again. Instead he retreated into the studio, to write and produce what was to be the group's crowning achievement, Pet Sounds. Written as a response to the gauntlet thrown down by the Beatles' Rubber Soul – 'an album made up of all good stuff' – Pet Sounds moved Wilson far beyond the teenage anthems to surfing and hot- rods on which the Beach Boys had built their success. Here were songs of adolescent yearning and the loss of innocence, of being out of step with the times, framed in elaborate arrangements and elegiac melodies.
Marilyn Wilson would later recall the night when Brian brought the completed record home. 'We had a stereo in the bedroom, and he goes, 'OK, are you ready?' But he was really serious – there was his soul in there, you know? And we just lay there all alone all night on the bed, and just listened and cried. It was really, really heavy.'
While a relative failure in commercial terms, Pet Sounds was what Wilson would call 'an industrial success', revolutionising the shape and production qualities of pop music, creating a new benchmark of which even the Beatles were in awe. Their producer, George Martin, would later acknowledge that without Pet Sounds, Sgt Pepper 'wouldn't have happened. Pepper was [the Beatles'] attempt to equal it'.
The sessions also produced what is probably Wilson's greatest song, Good Vibrations – the perfect marriage of musical innovation and a joyous optimism which he would never find in his music again. At the age of 23, he was being hailed as American pop music's first authentic genius.
Was it a good feeling to be so young and so lauded? 'To know we were loved and appreciated? It's like I say to a lot of people...' Wilson pauses. 'I'm sorry, what was the question?'
Driven by his need to surpass his own achievements, to live up to the mantle of 'genius', Wilson set to work on an album, to be called Smile, which he envisaged as his 'teenage symphony to God'. Never completed, it was to be the rock against which his fragile gifts were dashed.
By now he had begun experimenting with LSD, and was spiralling into a world of his own. For one famous recording session he insisted on all the musicians wearing firemen's helmets, the better to conjure the sound of a blazing furnace. When, a few days later, an adjacent building burnt down, Wilson destroyed the recording, believing he was responsible. Shortly afterwards, he returned home from an afternoon screening of the movie Seconds, paranoically convinced that the film was 'my whole life, right there on screen' and that Phil Spector had financed the production deliberately to freak him out.
He remodelled his house to conjure inspiration. The living-room was filled with a full-size Arabian tent, for smoking grass. In the dining- room, a 14ft-square box was built around his grand piano and filled with two tons of sand, so that Wilson could feel it between his toes as he composed. 'We had the beach right there in my house,' he says delightedly. 'You had to go barefoot. That was the rule. It set the mood for songwriting. And it really worked!'
He wrote his last great masterpiece, Surf's Up, in the sandpit. But it was finally removed when it was discovered that the sand was clogging the piano, and the dogs were using it as a dirt-box. Smile was eventually abandoned. 'I wanted to top Good Vibrations,' he says. 'I tried to, but I couldn't. And I just felt bummed out that I couldn't continue on with that streak.'
He pauses. 'Actually, a record as good as Good Vibrations is hard to top. That's why I had trouble.'
By the mid-Seventies, it was clear that Wilson was not so much eccentric as profoundly disturbed. He had now discovered cocaine, and was stoned most of the time. He had virtually withdrawn from writing and recording. On the infrequent occasions that he ventured out of the house he would be dressed in bathrobe and pyjamas. One story tells of Paul McCartney visiting to pay his respects, and a terrified Wilson locking himself in the chauffeur's quarters, refusing to come out. When McCartney knocked on the door, all he could hear was the sound of Wilson gently weeping.
Another story tells of Wilson disappearing, and being found some days later by the police in a park in San Diego, barefoot and dishevelled, with no means of identification, mistaken for a vagrant. Without his writing and production skills, the Beach Boys floundered. Like a workhorse, he would be periodically brought into the studio in increasingly desperate attempts to add lustre to their fading reputation. It is not a period that he likes to remember: 'A lot of frustration, some fears, some anxiety, some depression, some sorrow. A lot of all the emotions.'
In 1975 Marilyn put her husband in the care of Dr Eugene Landy, who was known as the 'Shrink to the Stars', having treated the actors Rod Steiger, Richard Harris and Gig Young (who later committed suicide). A year later, Landy was fired, after increasing his monthly fee from $10,000 to $20,000. But in 1983, with Wilson now in a desperate state, his family agreed to let Landy resume his treatment.
Under Landy's 'milieu therapy' programme, Wilson was placed under virtual 24-hour surveillance, policed by Landy's hulking assistants, whom friends of Wilson called 'the surf Nazis', and whose job was to monitor his every movement and report back to Landy. He was kept apart from his family (his marriage to Marilyn had ended in 1978), and put on a punishing dietary and exercise regime to reduce his weight. Freed from his addiction to drugs and food, he instead became addicted to Eugene Landy.
But Landy's role went far beyond that of psychotherapist. He installed himself as Wilson's manager, and was credited as co-writer and 'executive producer' on Wilson's first solo album, which was released in 1988. He cranked up his annual bill for treatment to $430,000, and reportedly took a third of the $250,000 advance for Wilson's ghost-written autobiography, Wouldn't It Be Nice?, which served primarily as an apologia for his unorthodox techniques.
It was around this time that Wilson met Melinda Ledbetter, the woman who would become his second wife. She was working as a saleswoman at a Cadillac dealership. Wilson came in and bought the first car he saw. The next day Landy telephoned Melinda and invited her to accompany Wilson to a Moody Blues concert. During the performance, Landy's assistant passed a note to Wilson, instructing him to 'be nice to your date. Show her some affection. Put your arm round her.' Later that evening, as they were driving home in a limousine, Landy phoned Wilson with more instructions: 'Walk Melinda to the door, also make sure you kiss her...'
It was, Melinda tells me later, 'a very strange situation. At that time Brian didn't draw breath without Dr Landy's permission. He couldn't go to the bathroom without asking somebody.'
They started dating more frequently, and Melinda quickly realised just how parlous his state was. 'It was almost like watching a child being abused. And I really felt that his life was in danger. Landy had him exercising vigorously on all kinds of different combinations of medication. It was very bad.'
As she grew closer to Wilson, she says, so Landy moved to keep her out of his life. In the meantime, she 'constantly hammered' at Wilson's family to pry him away from Landy. 'God bless his mother, I'll never forget when I said, 'You've got to get him out of there', and she said, 'But what would I do with him?' Then it was, OK, I get it... It was a dysfunctional family from the very first moment.'
It was to take almost three years to finally separate Wilson from Landy. In 1989, after charges of gross negligence were lodged by Wilson's family, the state of California revoked Landy's licence on the grounds that he had illegally prescribed drugs to Wilson. He was also charged with conflict of interest for acting not only as Wilson's therapist but also as his business manager. Yet Wilson himself refused to be separated from his psychiatrist.
In 1990, his family brought a lawsuit, alleging that Wilson's will had been redrafted to make Landy the chief beneficiary, collecting 70 per cent, with the remaining 30 per cent split evenly among Landy's girlfriend and Brian's two daughters. The lawsuit was settled out of court, and led to an independent conservator being granted limited power over Wilson's affairs. Finally, in 1991, the courts issued a separation order, forcing Landy out of Wilson's life altogether.
The very mention of Landy's name brings a flicker of panic into Wilson's eyes. He doesn't want to talk about it.
But you were relieved, I say, when that chapter in your life came to an end?
'Yeah, I was, because I was a little freaked out. When it finished I felt freer.'
The legacy of the period was an album entitled Sweet Insanity, which was never released, featuring Wilson's music and Landy's lyrics. An odd title, I say, given his condition at the time. 'It was Gene's idea. But actually I loved it,' says Wilson, brightening. 'I said, that's perfect. Because that's what the songs were about, insanity.'
Did you feel that you were insane?
'What? Oh, yeah. I lived it for nine or 10 years. A totally insane person.'
That's terrible, I say. He nods. 'It was rough.' Can you remember what was going through your mind? 'I can't remember.' His voice is drifting away.
You don't want to remember? 'No.'
'I fell in love with Brian very quickly,' says Melinda. 'He was the kindest, most honest person I had ever met. And at the same time he had an unbelievable strength about him. He was weak, and yet strong. That he could go through what he did and come out OK was just amazing to me.'
She believes that if he is in better shape than he has ever been it is because he now has 'a normalcy' which he never experienced before. 'Through that normal environment he's gained emotional security, and that's something he never had as a child, and didn't really have in his first marriage.'
Their two adopted daughters – five-year-old Daria and three-year-old Delanie – are sisters, both adopted at birth. In recent years, Wilson has also been reconciled with his two daughters from his first marriage, Carnie and Wendy (who in the Eighties had chart success themselves as Wilson Phillips), from whom he was long estranged.
'I didn't pay attention to them and I was a bad dad, and then in 1989 I wrote some songs for them and the music brought us together,' he says, compressing 30 years' pain into one sentence.
He still keeps musician's hours. He gets up around midday, then runs for a couple of miles, 'keeping up my health regime, my diet regime. Diet and exercise. They're the two most important things.'
He reads to the children and plays the piano for them. He watches TV. 'But my favourite thing is going out to eat in a restaurant. It never ceases to amaze me. You sit there and all of a sudden there's food before you!' Wilson shakes his head in unfeigned wonder. 'It blows my mind. It just does.'
It was largely at Melinda's instigation that he returned to touring. 'I felt he needed to get over this thing he called stage fright,' she says. 'And I felt that he needed to know what he meant to the world. I thought it would be very therapeutic for him to understand the impact he had made with his music. And it has been good for him.
'He wasn't comfortable at first. He was almost, like, robotic on stage. I'd hear these things, that people are making him do it. But nobody makes Brian do anything. He does not do anything he doesn't want to do. He just doesn't. He'll find a way to screw it up so bad and embarrass whoever's trying to make him do something. And the more he's done it the better he's got. And he likes doing it, he likes feeling the love.'
'Melinda convinced me to go on tour; it was her idea,' says Wilson. 'And look what happened! It's been fantastic and I've enjoyed it. It never ceases to amaze me. When I'm on stage I'm thanking God, if it wasn't for Melinda I wouldn't be up here performing.'
What would you be doing otherwise?
Wilson thinks about this. 'Exercising. But also sitting around a lot, not wanting to do anything. Watching the world go by.'
So you'd lost motivation? 'Right.'
And Melinda gave that back to you?
'She helped me out, yes she did.'
Wilson says he doesn't listen to modern music these days. 'It doesn't satisfy my soul, and I can't figure it out.' He shrugs. 'Nothing touches me.'
He listens to 'oldies-but-goodies' radio stations, to Nat 'King' Cole 'and the Christmas album by Phil Spector. 'Because it's getting to the holidays now, I'm starting to play his album a little bit early this year.'
Spector, he says, warming to the subject, was 'a major god. The first Phil Spector record I heard was He's Sure the Boy I Love. And then I heard Da Doo Ron Ron, Be My Baby, Then He Kissed Me, Walking in the Rain... ' He smiles beatifically at the memory of all this. 'I could go on for ever...
'It opened the doors like you wouldn't believe. It opened up a door of creativity for me. Some people say drugs can open that door. But Phil Spector opened it for me. But I have to admit that I did smoke a little grass when I did Pet Sounds. That was the only album I ever smoked grass to make. But it was quite an experience because I could just feel the inspiration coming so fast. I couldn't believe where it was coming from. And the grass helped me to be creative; to look at my piano keys and say, look there's a whole keyboard here. On marijuana you can slip into a creative mode very comfortably, rather than going, I just can't get this written.
'I was 23 years old when I did Pet Sounds, and because of that my youth was there; my youth carried the load, and the creativity which stems from drugs. A lot of people say it's not good to take drugs; drugs are bad. I don't agree. I think now and then drugs can help.'
He pauses, corrects himself. 'Basically medicine, not just drugs, is what I really mean. I take medicine every day. I take medicine for depression, for anxiety and to sleep at night. And it works, it really works. More people should look into taking medicine. A lot of people are out there with brain... what do you call it? Brain disorders. Some people need medicine to correct the imbalance in their brain. It keeps me stabilised. It keeps me on the ball. It keeps me thinking about the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is all that music out there that's been recorded; you have this amazing memory of all that music. It makes me want to create.
'When people like you, you don't want to let them down. You want to keep up the good music. And that's one of my problems with the writer's block: I'm so into pleasing people, and living up to my name.'
Wilson shakes his head. 'I'm just wondering when the hell I'm going to get going.'
There will be nights, says Melinda, when Wilson will go to the piano room 'and he'll play things like I've never heard in my life. And I'll listen, and I'll think, where is that coming from? And then the next day I'll say, play what you played last night. And he'll say, oh, I don't know what it was. So... I can't explain, and he can't either.
'I hear wonderful melodies coming from him. What I would say is that he doesn't want to share right now. But I don't question it, because he's being what he wants to be and doing what he wants to do. I believe his genius is still there. I believe that his best work is yet to come. One day he'll simply say, OK...'
Murry Wilson died in 1973. Brian says he felt 'great remorse, scared and bummed. I loved him and he died.' Loved him despite the way he treated you? 'Yes.' His brother, Dennis, drowned in 1983, after diving, intoxicated, off the side of a boat in Santa Monica marina. At the time of his death, he was homeless, reduced to staying with friends and cadging drinks from strangers in bars.
Carl Wilson died in 1998 of cancer. It is Carl who Brian thinks of now when he's performing. 'I feel a great sentiment when I sing Darlin' and God Only Knows, because he used to sing those on tour. And it's an emotional moment in my life when I sing those songs. It's a way for me to get in touch with my brother, even though he's dead he's still alive in the music, I think.'
And Dennis?
'Yeah, Dennis was a great music maker. He was really good.'
You must miss them terribly.
'I do.' He pauses for a moment, as if something has just occurred to him. 'I've survived my whole family,' he says.
Perhaps, I say, there's a meaning in that.
'Maybe there is...'
I ask him if he would mind sitting at the piano for a while. He nods and leads the way upstairs to the piano room. Walking in, you would have no sense of who Brian Wilson was and the monumental scale of his accomplishments. There is a desk with a handful of awards – a Grammy nomination, a lifetime achievement award – but no gold or platinum records on the wall, no framed concert posters, no evidence of his past.
'Brian,' says Melinda, 'doesn't like to wallow in the mire. That's what he calls it, 'wallowing in the mire'.'
Wilson sits at the piano and begins to play Rhapsody in Blue, eyes closed as he leans into the music. Then stops. Something else has come into his mind. He strikes the first, familiar chords and starts singing, 'I may not always love you/ But long as there are stars above you/ You never need to doubt it/ I'll make you so sure about it/ God only knows what I'd be without you...' His voice is cracked, straining, unbearably poignant.
Suddenly, it is as if all the stiffness and uneasiness that Wilson has been displaying for the past hour has lifted from his shoulders. Now he starts into Proud Mary, the old Creedence Clearwater Revival song. He has been working on a version in the studio that he'd like to release as a single, which he's sure would be a hit.
I ask, would you like another number one? 'I'd love one!' Maybe, he says, the answer to his writer's block is to work with Phil Spector, 'although I don't know if it's possible. I know I could, but I don't know if he could. He's supposed to be hard to work with.'
Does he realise how unlikely such a collaboration would be? Spector has not made a record in more than 20 years. Wilson met him several times in the Sixties. 'He was very egotistical, self-centred. A very... scary kind of talking style. Just a very scary person.' He seems to shudder slightly at the memory. Then he starts to play Be My Baby.
Is this, I ask, the place where he feels safest and most secure? 'At my piano, yeah. I feel my name and myself is part of this piano right here.' Wilson taps the top of the piano with his hand and thinks about this. 'And in restaurants,' he says at last. 'I love restaurants.'