For the last couple of nights I've been watching a fellow Brian, Brian Wilson, former senior Beach Boy, on the telly, playing Beach Boy music, but at the age of about sixty. And I watched and listened with a sort of ghastly fascination.

You can see the problem right there in the name of that group. They weren't called the Beach Boys for nothing. And there was something really odd about watching this sixty year old guy, who looked more like a Democrat Presidential Candidate than a pop singer, singing boy songs, in an old-guy-trying-to-do-a-young-guy voice.

The story is that … Well, other people know the story far better than I do, so let one of them tell it:

BEACH BOYS star BRIAN WILSON has played the 'lost' album 'SMILE' for the first time ever in London.

The singer played the first night of a residency at the London Royal Festival Hall this evening (February 20), the first dates on a tour which will visit other cities throughout the UK this month.

The gig itself was split into two sections. The first opened with a fifteen minute acoustic set, followed by a ‘Greatest Hits’ show. During this, Wilson, backed by an 18-piece band, performed a number of songs from 'Pet Sounds', including God Only Knows' and 'Wouldn't It Be Nice'.

After a short interval Wilson then returned to the stage where 'Smile' was played for the first time in full.

The RFH audience were there to worship and to adore, and they did. But me, I just thought, what a pity it wasn't finished and recorded in 1967, like all those other great Beach Boy tracks like Sloop John B, Good Vibrations, California Girls, and the rest of them. What a pity it sounded rough and live, instead of perfectly produced like those old numbers. And sounding rough and ready and live, it didn't sound to me like music that was anything like as great as the audience obviously thought it was.

Beach Boy music, it occurs to me, is like the string quartet repertoire. Once you've heard it done properly, note perfect, perfectly in time, perfectly in tune, then anything not as good as that is just not good enough, and you almost suspect the music itself of being second rate. This was pretty good music, and the playing was often pretty decent. But I wanted perfect young voices, and perfect sounds to back them.

A lot of rock and roll music sounds fine if it's sung by old geezers, forty years after they first did it. The Rolling Stones sound as great as ever, in my opinion. But the purity and innocence of the Beach Boys, rehashed by an old guy, sounds undignified to the point almost of insanity. For me, there was even a whiff of, say, a very old Bette Davis trying to act like a teenage girl. That Brian Wilson has not always been completely, er, in control of his thought processes, only, for me, added to the extreme strangeness of it all, to put it no more strongly than that. But I'm sure that any suggestion of this that the worshippers felt only added to how much they loved the man.. That their hero was prepared to brave the scorn of unbelievers such as I only added to their adoration. And if they felt anything of the sort that I felt but suppressed the thought with another that went: better late than never, well, there I thoroughly agree. It was a remarkable occasion.

The worshippers will buy the live recording of the event, and will love it and treasure it. Me, I actually look forward to a cover version, done as well as those classic early tracks were done, with young voices and perfect electronically synthetic music instead of rough and ready and live music.