Smile
Friday, 15 October 2010
By the way, I was sitting in the canteen at the City Lit a few years ago on a Saturday lunchtime, reading the paper, and I saw that Brian Wilson was performing at the Festival Hall. It was going to be Smile, which was the album that the Beach Boys were going to release but never did. The story goes that after the magnificent Pet Sounds, George Martin was inspired to push recording technology to the limits, employing multi-tracking, filters, tape effects and pioneering techniques on the masterpiece that was Sgt Pepper. Wilson listened to Sgt Pepper and decided simply to ditch Smile, on the grounds that whatever he did would be eclipsed by Martin and the Fab Four.
So Smile had sat on the shelf for 40 years, and had never been heard in its entirety until now. On a Friday night in London, the full glory of the ‘missing’ Beach Boys album would finally be revealed. And of course the concert had been sold out for months, tickets snapped up by afficionados, geeks, historians and anyone nostalgic for what might have been. On a whim I called the box office just to ask whether there had been any returns. The woman who answered was amazed. There hadn’t been any returns for weeks, she said, but just twenty seconds earlier someone had returned a pair of tickets and I could have them. They were the best seats in the house, in a little box above the stage, where the beautiful acoustics of the RFH could best be appreciated, and were mine for £180 each.
So I swallowed hard and bought the tickets. I phoned Hev and told her to cancel whatever she was thinking of doing, to put on her glad rags and to meet me on the South Bank at 7.30. She wanted to know more.
“Oh, trust me, I said. You’ll love it.”
We met in the NFT bar, and she was none the wiser. “I love a surprise”, she said, eyes gleaming. “What are we seeing?”
“You’ll see.“
And so we wandered over, picked up the tickets at the desk, and I handed her hers.
“Brian Wilson and friends”, she read out loud. “Oh Jesus, not the fucking Bee Gees…”