http://www.smh.com.au/news/gig-reviews/brian-wilson-that-lucky-old-sun/2007/12/19/1197740319803.htmlBrian Wilson: That Lucky Old Sun
James Button
December 19, 2007
Dressed in a baggy yellow T-shirt, he walks slowly and tentatively onto the stage and sits at a keyboard. His playing is minimal: his hands mostly hang by his sides. His eyes flit to the autocue in front of him with the words to his songs.
Far from leading his exuberant 11-man band, he looks as if he is trying to keep time, like grandpa on the side of the dance floor at a 21st birthday party. He waves a bearish paw in the air as if trying to catch one of the notes he wrote, notes that make him, to many, the greatest pop song writer of all time.
It is a disturbing, compelling experience. The crowd at London's Royal Festival Hall love it. It is hard to tell, but maybe Brian Wilson does, too.
In his 65-year-old face and body is the whole wretched story: his father's endless cruelty, the decades of drugs, binge eating, schizophrenia and sorrow. He still has the spaced-out and defenceless air of someone who has suffered manic depression. His eyes, wrote the journalist Ginny Dougary after interviewing him in 2002, "look as though they will never recover from the horrors they have seen".
But Wilson has recovered - sort of - and in that miracle lies the meaning of his new show, That Lucky Old Sun, which he will bring to the Sydney Festival. Wilson has taken a Negro spiritual and turned it into a spoken poem - a song cycle, he calls it - that combines a vision of the modern city with echoes of his own lost years: "All these voices, all these memories, made me feel like stone ... chapters missing [and] pages torn."
I didn't find it particularly memorable - nor did Wilson, apparently, as his eyes kept straying to the autocue - but it is only a small part of the show. He played nearly all his Beach Boys hits, from Good Vibrations to Barbara Ann, and did it with gusto. He hugged an imaginary surfer girl. He mimed eating as he sang "ate up all of my grits" in Sloop John B. When he sang of love he rubbed his heart in circular motions: was it to check that his pacemaker was working?
Of course, it is slightly disturbing to hear a 65-year-old sing "I'd love just once to see you in the nude". Ringo Starr said recently he no longer sang his hit You're Sixteen - it's a bad look at 67. But with Wilson it is a little different because he never inhabited the world of girls, sun and surfing that he invented. Instead, he was curled up in his room. That he has recovered enough from his misery to have a new family and be able to tour is a human triumph. He looks like a man whom life has nearly destroyed, yet who has been handed a late moment of grace.
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