In the time since he passed away on June 11, the music industry has been trying to come to terms with the heartbreaking loss of songwriting genius Brian Wilson. Here, with exclusive new tributes from Decca co-presidents Laura Monks and Tom Lewis, plus UTA boss Neil Warnock, Music Week reflects on the life, times and indelible impact made by the man who, through his seminal work with The Beach Boys and under his own name, helped to transform popular music forever. There will never be another like him…
WORDS: James Hanley
PHOTO: Harry Langdon, Getty
God only knows where we’d be without Brian Wilson. Indeed, the curtain call of executives and musicians that lined up to deify the Beach Boys leader upon his passing, aged 82, spoke volumes of his monumental impact.
“Quite simply, Brian Wilson changed music,” said Laura Monks, co-president of Decca, which released his 11th and final studio album, At My Piano, in 2021.
Speaking exclusively to Music Week, Monks said that Wilson’s “global influence is incalculable and his legend will only grow”.
“At My Piano saw him retrace his steps and reimagine his greatest songs in their purest form,” Monks added. “Releasing it was a poignant privilege.”
Decca co-president Tom Lewis told Music Week that the major “playing even the tiniest part in Brian’s recorded legacy is the most extraordinary honour”.
And what a legacy it is. Born in Inglewood, California, in 1942, Wilson co-founded “America’s band” with his late brothers Dennis and Carl, alongside cousin Mike Love and Al Jardine in 1961. The Beach Boys’ breakthrough Surfin’ USA – a reworking of Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen – followed two years later and characterised the “California sound”.
“Our forte is harmonics, we have a harmony blend – because we’re brothers and a cousin, we’re a family,” Wilson told Bob Harris in an interview on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1976. “There’s a certain family blend: our throats are similar or something, I don’t know.”
The group went on to sell more than 100 million records worldwide, including two UK No.1 singles: Good Vibrations and Do It Again. In total, they have had 13 UK Top 10 singles, two UK No.1 albums and 15 Top 10 records and currently have 14 million monthly Spotify listeners. The band were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 1988.
After a nervous breakdown in 1964, Wilson quit touring aged just 22 and focused his energies into the studio. The results were legendary: the Beach Boys’ 11th LP in just four years, the 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds, is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time. While not an immediate commercial success, it has post-1994 sales of 701,222 sales according to the Official Charts Company and spawned beloved pop standards such as God Only Knows, Wouldn’t It Be Nice and Sloop John B.
“It’s hard to say exactly when the sound of Pet Sounds started,” recounted Wilson in his 2016 memoir, I Am Brian Wilson (published by Coronet). “It was something that was coming for a while. Maybe it started when I first heard Be My Baby and I began to understand how you could make emotions through sound. Maybe it started when I began to understand more about soul singers like Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin, and how they could make you feel amazing things with small vocal gestures. Maybe it started on the second side of The Beach Boys’ Today!, when I started to make softer and slower songs that weren’t exactly love ballads but snapshots of how I was feeling as I grew up. It was probably all those things put together. But it started to change what I was doing.”
Pet Sounds’ sonic wizardry helped shape The Beatles’ Revolver (1966) and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), but was itself motivated by an earlier entry in their canon: 1965’s Rubber Soul.
“It blew my mind,” Wilson wrote in his memoir. “I thought it was a collection of songs that somehow went together like no album ever made before, and I was very impressed. I was so inspired that I started writing Pet Sounds.”
Shelving work on Pet Sounds follow-up Smile in 1967, Wilson eventually completed the record as a solo project – Brian Wilson Presents Smile (157,344 sales) – in 2004. Wilson billed it as a “teenage symphony to God”, and performed the world premiere to a rapturous reception at London’s Royal Festival Hall in February that year – greeted by a 10-minute standing ovation.
Other top UK sellers by the Beach Boys included compilations The Very Best Of The Beach Boys (746,808 sales), Sounds Of Summer (367,127), Love You (329,357), Icon (253,469), The Pet Sounds Sessions (145,992) and The Greatest Hits – Vol 1 (145,205).
It is little wonder, then, that his passing has struck such a chord, with Universal Music Group chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge declaring that Wilson’s “innovative work in the studio transformed the way musicians record even to this day”.
Wilson’s international booking agent, Neil Warnock, recalled many incredible moments with the star.
“The word genius is bandied around so widely, but I can’t think of many artists whose body of work consistently hits those heady heights,” the UTA boss told Music Week. “Once, at a show at Brighton Centre, there was a rumour that Paul McCartney was coming, but I’d forgotten about that when I went backstage. I went into the dressing room and there were Paul and Brian gossiping about their favourite music and just catching up.”
Paul McCartney himself said, “the notes Brian heard in his head and passed to us were simple and brilliant at the same time”.
Elton John, meanwhile, described Wilson as “the biggest influence on my songwriting ever”. Bruce Springsteen praised his “otherworldly ear for harmony”, while peers including Bob Dylan, Carole King, John Cale, Ringo Starr, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Roger Daltrey, Mick Fleetwood and Wilson’s surviving bandmates also paid tribute.
Love & Mercy, a 2014 biographical drama starring Paul Dano and John Cusack, explored Wilson’s drug use and lifelong struggles with mental illness – including his spell under the care of Dr. Eugene Landy. The controversial psychologist first came into Wilson’s life in the 1970s, later becoming his executive producer, business manager, co-songwriter and business adviser. In 1991, Wilson’s family took out a restraining order against Landy, who died in 2006.
Launching his first solo run in 1999, Wilson toured regularly for the next 20 years – including a four-night Pet Sounds residency at Royal Festival Hall in 2002 and a memorable Glastonbury turn in 2005, as well as a 50th-anniversary reunion tour with the Beach Boys in 2012.
Wilson’s last major global outing was a 50th-anniversary celebration of Pet Sounds, which he toured as a solo artist in 2016. Five years later, At My Piano marked the end of his recorded output.
“It was as the world was emerging from lockdown, so we had to think carefully about his health and give him time and space,” Decca’s Tom Lewis recalled. “In the end, Brian recorded onto a piano that could also record the notes. We set up an equivalent piano in London to mirror his playing. It was very moving and slightly haunting watching the keys move, knowing they were echoing Brian’s fingers across the Atlantic.”
Wilson’s passing was announced by his family on June 11. No cause of death was given. Wilson’s wife Melinda died in 2024. He is survived by his two daughters, five adopted children and six grandchildren.
