Ghost on the sand

'Good Vibrations', 'Wouldn't It Be Nice', 'God Only Knows' - Beach Boy Brian Wilson wrote some of the world's definitive pop songs before disappearing from public view. Jay Merrick remembers the sounds of his youth and welcomes the return of a reclusive genius

The classrooms in the teaching blocks at my Scottish school were divided by wood panelled book rooms which tended to lack books. A few dusty, warped canes in an umbrella stand, boxes, bits and pieces that hardly registered in a teenager's mind in 1966. But one of those rooms contained an old record player. I see it now, and I see the shiny album sleeve in my hands: green with blobby type in white and yellow over a photo of the Beach Boys in some kind of animal sanctuary. Brian Wilson is trying to feed a goat. He looks pale, kind of jumpy.

I see again my hand dropping the needle onto the record's gleaming rim. There is a hiss like distant frying. And then the intro to "Wouldn't It Be Nice". Outside, the lawns are pearly with frost, but in the book room I can see the girls on the beach, smell the Sea & Ski suntan lotion, hear the shuff of the glazed breakers on the sand. And then I'm on stage, at the mike between Brian and Carl, wearing a red and white striped shirt just like the ones in the cover shot from Beach Boys Concert. Like them, I'm "from Hawthorne, California, to entertain you tonight in a gala concert and a recording session!"

A few years later, at the Lincoln Rock Festival, it's raining hard on the human mulch as Slade finish a Brumtastic set. But the bill-toppers are the Beach Boys and I'm nervous. Why have they come to play in a muddy field? I'm excited. Brian isn't here. He's history. There are rumours: he's deaf so he can't sing properly; he's a recluse, Howard Hughes with a shaggy bob; his nervous system is lysergic; he is as mad as a boot. Okay, but I'll see Carl and Mike Love and Al Jardine, three of the famous five and their session players. I'll hear them. And I wonder, in my crappy Army surplus tent smelling of sweat, mould, pancakes and cannabis: can they really sing? Will anybody listen?

The Beach Boys take the stage to generously ironic cheers. And, again, the almost fearful thought: what are they doing here? Maybe they'll sing alternative lyrics, and we'll have "Fen, Fen, Fen till our fathers take the Mini Clubmans away-ee-ay-yay". Start with something easy, I murmur. Start with "I Get Around".

They launch, quite stunningly, into "Heroes and Villains", one of the most vocally complex songs in pop. The rambling first line shimmers outwards from the Marshall stacks: "I've been in this town so long that, back in the city, I've been taken for lost and gone, and unknown for a long, long time ..."

And now in 2002 Brian Wilson, lost and gone and unknown for a long, long time, is on his way to London, and any true lover of pop will note the prospect with a frisson because, at the heart of the Beach Boys strange appeal, lies an anomaly: why should five guys singing about white, middle-class southern California jock stuff in barbershop falsettos have mattered one iota of a damn in a world where the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, Dylan, Motown, Memphis, and their progeny have dominated record sales with barbed irony, fractured poetry, mongrel blues, art school angst, and surreal freak-outery? What had Brian, Carl, Dennis – sons of a despotic half-blind father, Murry – and their friends Mike Love and dental student Al Jardine, got to do with this gonzo caravanserai?

Escapism? Too simple. There are thousands of ways to escape. Why not Jan and Dean or the Four Freshmen? Why the Beach Boys in particular – the Beach Boys, who were never cool or strange enough to be classed as exotic or esoteric? The answer is that their protean creator Brian Wilson, whose forthcoming shows at the Royal Festival Hall are almost sold out, did not exist at all; neither did the times and places he wrote about. The little deuce coupe, the surfer girl standing by the ocean's roar, the northern girls with the way they kiss? Beautiful figments that defy obvious reaction. We sit, like Prospero, charmed and bemused by Ariel's flights of fancy on an island of dreams.

Some pop is superbly banal; some is generated by sharply identifiable times and places. Think of the jailbait wall-of-sound Ronettes, and then of the tight-lipped acidity of John Lennon singing Norwegian Wood. But the California, the vibrations, the endless summers that Wilson created came from somewhere else. He took harmonies and layered them through lyrics to create an ethereal zone so innocent that it was metaphysical. And we knew it wasn't true, but we bought it. The 40,000 who packed Wembley on a sunny day in 1975 to worship at the altar of Elton John bought it so completely that thousands began to leave after the penultimate act, the Beach Boys, proved way too hot for the gurning Rocket Man to follow.

The Beatles' producer, George Martin, remains in awe of Wilson, considers him to be pop's only living genius and says the Beatles wouldn't have made Sergeant Pepper unless Pet Sounds – itself prompted by Rubber Soul – hadn't issued such a sublime challenge. Wilson's was a genius whose rare musical imaginings were matched by technical adventure. Even after the arrival of eight-track recording kit, he tended to lay the instrumental backing on one track – to ensure that it could not be tampered with – using the rest for vocals. Given the complexity of some arrangements, it's quite extraordinary that songs including "God Only Knows" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice" were completed in single sessions without overdubs. Wilson's later songs, using high-risk lyrical collaborators such as Van Dyke Parks and ad copywriter Don Asher, were cooked up like base metal into gold by the reclusive alchemist.

But regardless of legend status and album after album going platinum, Wilson's agoraphobic soul has kept him in the same place where he began to deliver the goods in 1964: "There's a world where I can go and tell my secrets to/ In my room, in my room ..."

"In My Room" is apparently nothing more than two minutes and 24 seconds of puppy-fattish, teen solipsism. Its instrumental setting is pretty bare, and today we might take the breathy harmonies for granted. David Crosby later admitted to hearing the song and wondering how the Beach Boys had achieved such vocal perfection – and wasn't sure if Crosby Stills and Nash, all full grown chick-balling dudes, could match what those teenagers had tossed off so effortlessly. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, John Cale, REM's Peter Buck, Tom Petty and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore have all paid their respects to the Beach Boys phenomenon.

Wilson's Icarus moment came in 1966 with the nonpareil Pet Sounds, in which arrangements and lyrics meshed to quite extraordinary effect. Emotion, naivety, longing, regret – out it came in an aurora borealis of orchestrations and harmonies. Wilson, whose early albums relied on Chuck Berry riffs and later, on Beach Boys Today, luscious Phil Spectorish walls-of-sound, had delivered something so sublime that there was nowhere else to go. Smiley Smile, the next album, contained "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains", but it also carried weird duds – "Vegetables", "She's Going Bald". The wax on Wilson's golden wings was melting.

But the wax – as in albums – keeps coming. Wilson, who also plays Glasgow and Dublin on his new tour, will appear with a ten-piece band to recreate Pet Sounds on stage. But he will also include songs from his recent solo albums. One, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times", has elegiac re-takes of "Caroline No" and "Do It Again". It also revisits the tender simplicities of "In My Room" with songs such as "Love and Mercy", "Wonderful" and "This Whole World".

Will Brian Wilson, the ghost of Hawthorne, California, the eternally shy, therapised dreamer, pull it off? I hope he starts with something simple.

Brian Wilson performs as part of the Mojo 100th series, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (020 7960 4242) 27 to 30 Jan. The series, including a screening of 'Brian Wilson: A Beach Boy's Tale' on 31 Jan at the National Film Theatre, London SE1 (020 7928 3232) continues until 6 Feb

Five of the best

Fun, Fun, Fun

The live version from 1964's Beach Boys Concert album proves they could play and deliver their harmonies effortlessly. "I Get Around" may be their early period signature tune, but this song is the one that hits the demographic bull's eye.

She Knows Me Too Well

From 1965's Beach Boys Today, Wilson's most densely wall-of-sound album, which contains "Help Me, Ronda". But as a refined sugar example of naive guy-naive chick pop, this is the pick. Wilson, who produced and mixed all the albums, never again used echo and keening vocals so luxuriously.

Caroline No

The 1966 flip-side of "God Only Knows", and Wilson's most perfectly pared-down elegy to lost love. The opening lines, over delicate harpsichord effects, are classic: "Where did your long hair go, where is the girl I used to know, how could you lose that happy glow?" And the tremulous solo voice means every word: during the making of Pet Sounds, Brian dreamed he had a halo.

Heroes and Villains

With the exception of "Good Vibrations", this 1967 song is about as cool and surreal as the Beach Boys ever got.The vocal masterpiece.

Do It Again

An unlikely 1968 hit single. The instrumentation was untypical and almost funky but, as always with Wilson's most wistful songs, the first line unspools and you're hooked: "It's automatic when I talk with old friends, the conversation turns to girls we knew when their hair was long and the beach was the place to go..."