The Beach Boys at Poble Espanyol, July 2012, live review. (Originally published in the Stool Pigeon magazine)
(A quick 2023 intro: I spend a lot of my time thinking about bests, worsts and top tens — the habits of a typical music journalist of a certain age, perhaps. Among these frequent ponderings is: what is the best concert I have ever been to? Kraftwerk at the Brixton Academy in 2004 pops up frequently in my thoughts; as does Brian Wilson performing Smile at London’s Royal Festival Hall in the same year. But my answer to this question — not that anyone else is asking it, sadly — is The Beach Boys at Barcelona’s Poble Espanyol in July 2012. It was part of their 50th Anniversary Reunion Tour, which saw Brian back with the live band, and The Smile Sessions still loomed large in my listening habits. Plus, my wife was pregnant with our first child. So it was a great time for a gig, which perhaps explains why it has lingered so long in my mind. I wrote up the concert for The Stool Pigeon, a brilliantly anarchic British music newspaper that would sadly fold less than a year later. I don’t think they ever put it online, though, which is an indication of both how long ago 2012 is and The Stool Pigeon’s perhaps slightly lax attitude to online media. (I’m pretty sure they themselves admitted this.) So, with the editor’s permission, I posted it on my blog in August of the the same year. I’m re-posting it now on Medium because it looks a lot nicer here and I would love some more people to read it. I’m kind of surprised, looking back at the review , that it wasn’t even more positive. I remembering really, really enjoying the show. But perhaps that tells us something about the power of context in shaping our thoughts: the fact that I saw The Beach Boys AND Brian Wilson playing ALL THESE songs just 10 years ago seems vaguely fantastical now. I’ve pasted a setlist at the end, so you can see. Also, I really wish I had bought a T-shirt.)
The Beach Boys at Poble Espanyol, July 2012
Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys have spent most of the last two decades as forlornly separate entities, united by history but divided by everything from lawsuits to mental health problems.
And yet throughout this time the two parties have done pretty much everything other than reunite: Brian toured much-loved Beach Boys album Pet Sounds and even re-recorded legendary lost release Smile as a solo project, while The Beach Boys lumbered on under the leadership of Mike Love, taking the perfect pop songs that a teenage Wilson wrote in the 60s to arenas around the world.
As such, it was both a relief and a worry when Wilson announced that he would be getting back with The Beach Boys for a tour and album to mark their 50th anniversary. A relief because, at the end of it all, you feel that Brian Wilson really should be at the helm of The Beach Boys, the band he formed back in 1961 and drove to imperial pop stardom.
And a worry because this, frankly, sounded like an opportunity for Wilson to undo all the good work he had done in the band’s name over the last few years. Lest we forget, the last original Beach Boys album to bear Wilson’s name, 1996’s Stars And Stripes Volume 1, contained widely-panned country rock version of some of the band’s most-loved songs.
The stakes were high, then, for the return to the fold of probably the most talented songwriter in pop history; the return, really, of the perfect pop group, one of the few to nail both dumb-as-nails teenage anthems and the darker, more complex side of pop.
This divide is played out in the audience at this Barcelona show, which is split evenly between anxious looking young men taking a night off from their Smile bootlegs, and, well, your mum and dad, resplendent in Hawaiian shirts and looking to boogie.
It’s played out, too, in the monstrous 45-song set, which takes in everything from early songs about surfing and cars (Little Deuce Coupe, 409, Shut Down etc), to party dance band covers (Rock and Roll Music, Why Do Fools Fall In Love), Pet Sounds classics (God Only Knows, Sloop John B), late-period melancholia (Sail On Sailor) and the new album, That’s Why God Made The Radio, whose title track is a worthy inclusion. They even play bloody Cocktail-soundtracking nonsense Kokomo and, freed from its 80s studio sheen and with the audience softened up by two hours of solid pop gold, it doesn’t sound all that bad.
The temptation is to spend the gig Brian watching. After all, it’s not often you have the opportunity to see such a genuine pop master on show, let along one with his chequered history of drug abuse, therapy and musical genius. And he seems pretty well throughout, sat passively behind a grand piano which he occasionally plonks, adding backing vocals and even taking a sporadic lead.
He’s not exactly the life and soul of the party, admittedly, but then again Brian had already given up performing live with the group during their majestic Pet Sounds phase and somehow it’s enough just to have him there, on stage, with the band in 2012. The excitement, too, when he takes his first lead vocal on Surfer Girl is palpable and, if Brian doesn’t look too engaged by one of his most-loved songs, he still pretty much hits all the notes, to the audience’s evident delight.
The contribution of the rest of the band shouldn’t be overlooked, though. If Brian provides historical significance, legitimacy and a watchful air that things are being done right, the band — original Beach Boys Mike Love, Al Jardine and David Marks, plus long-time member Bruce Johnston and accompanying musicians (including two musical directors) — supply musical backing that excels by playing it straight, resisting the temptation to unnecessarily mess around with some of pop music’s best loved songs.
Most of all, though, the band provide the note-perfect harmonies which remain the Beach Boys’ signature after all these years. At times the vocal interplay is quite stunning, transforming opener Do It Again from a standard rock plodder into a work of exceptional beauty and lending a heart-breaking edge to Don’t Worry Baby.
The vocal acrobatics on Heroes and Villains or Good Vibrations, meanwhile, are well worn but it is still a shock to hear them performed so effortlessly live. Mike Love, you have to conclude, may be something of a schlocky old man — witness his painfully drawn out speech on why Catalonians won’t be supporting Spain in the next day’s basketball game — but, damn it, he can sing, as his turn on Surfing USA demonstrates.
The gig, then is nostalgic — how could it be anything else? And, yes, there’s an element of box ticking in finally seeing one of the greatest bands in history unite with their leader.
But it was so much more than that. The gig was, in fact, a display of pop perfection: timeless songs, played straight, with breath-taking vocal interaction. It was, in other words, classic Beach Boys. And there was really nothing to worry about.
Setlist (borrowed from https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-beach-boys/2012/poble-espanyol-barcelona-spain-13dc8d39.html)
Do It Again
Little Honda
Catch a Wave
Hawaii
Don’t Back Down
Surfin’ Safari
Surfer Girl
It’s OK
You’re So Good to Me
Getcha Back
Then I Kissed Her
Please Let Me Wonder
Come Go With Me
(The Del‐Vikings cover)
Why Do Fools Fall in Love
(Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers cover)
When I Grow Up (to Be a Man)
Darlin’
Cotton Fields
(Lead Belly cover)
Be True to Your School
Ballad of Ole’ Betsy
Don’t Worry Baby
Little Deuce Coupe
409
Shut Down
I Get Around
In My Room
All This Is That
Good Timin’
Sail On, Sailor
That’s Why God Made the Radio
Heroes and Villains
California Dreamin’
(The Mamas & the Papas cover)
God Only Knows
Sloop John B
Wouldn’t It Be Nice
Good Vibrations
California Girls
Dance, Dance, Dance
All Summer Long
Help Me, Rhonda
Rock and Roll Music
(Chuck Berry cover)
Barbara Ann
(The Regents cover)
Surfin’ U.S.A.
Encore:
Kokomo
Do You Wanna Dance?
(Bobby Freeman cover)
Fun, Fun, Fun
