Rangy Manatee

I'm about to hear Brian Wilson's Smile in its entirety. I have a copy. It's waiting to be played. I've heard nothing from it thus far other than the obvious tracks thrown together elsewhere on previous releases.

The Beach Boys are so inextricably part of my musical makeup. Or should I say Pet Sounds is. They are a complex band for me in that they are so supremely uncool. And I surround myself with music cool and collectable and foreign. And often so utterly influenced by them. Every whoop, every harmony multiplied more than two ways, or songs about love always bring me back to Pet Sounds. Super Furry Animals, The Animal Collective, Cornelius. They do the Beach Boys every time they commit sound to tape. Kind of.

No, come on, I'm making a point here. Let's keep that bold statement. That one above. The outlandish and rather untrue one…

I can't help but feel the Beach Boys are a problem. The Beatles seem almost too riddled with cliché and text to approach, yet purely for their prolific output they seem to be a multiplicity of bands. No two (later) albums sound the same and each of the three songwriters had enough of a drugged-up, experimentalism to take them in their individual (and frequently brilliant directions.) To sum up, The Beatles became cool - and by a process of elimination, Ringo was always a bit rubbish. Sorry pal. (Anne Robinson would be proud. What of, I'm unsure. Perhaps she'd enjoy my frequent use of parenthesis.)

The Beach Boys were never cool. And clearly by cool I don't mean mullet-rejecting, sandal wearers. I mean credible. I mean that you could admit to people that you liked them. Can you see me late 60s dropping The Beach Boys' name into conversation to impress a girl? Can you really see me impressing a girl? Or for that matter living in a parallel and faraway universe gone by? You can't. I'd be quoting Syd Barrett or better still, I dunno, Robert Wyatt.

Point is The Beach Boys songs were all about surfing, teenage love and animals. And this is fine to a point but it results in a stylistic and lyrical cul de sac and eventually led to most of the band finding Brian 'difficult' while he got around to considering time, death and madness. Topics any self-respecting man should have contemplated long before his eighteenth birthday.

So what will a spruced up, shiny new 2004 production of the ultimately mythical album do for me? I've read reviews. People having been creaming. They tell me it's all I could hope for and more, but not as good as it would have...

Yada yada. Bore me.

What I want know is will I want to rip my stereo apart in the same way that I did when I first set ears upon Bonnie "Prince" (these inverted commas really mean something now don't they) Billy's re-workings of his finest hour. Fairly does it. I've come to discover some gems on that album. But why keep me waiting till the end before you unleash the unimaginably beautiful remake of Workhorse Blues before slamming in the hilariously brilliant I am a Cinematographer - a song I have only come to love through watching my girlfriend bounce around her room to it. It really is genius. And yet from the second track onwards I find a need to keep the remote I constantly lose close by me for fear of madness. That fucking piano.

Anyway. I continue to digress.

Will the production (of Smile) leave me safe in the knowledge that Wilson was indeed the forward-thinking experimentalist we all kind of hoped he was, if only to convince us that we were right to like a band about as kitsch as Kylie? Or will it be the predictable gloss that so made me sick of the Bonnie Billy rewrite of history.

Ha! History. What does that word mean anyway?

The answer to the former question is, I don’t know. I haven’t listened to the bugger yet. There’s only so far I can guess.

But while I’m on the Bonnie Prince topic. I recently read a rare interview with Will Oldham from The Wire Online from December 2003. In it, he makes some rather hilarious remarks. For example, his considered opinion of Michael Moore is summed up in the phrase “Michael Moore is a big fag I think.” Now I ain’t gonna jump on that rather fun-sounding bandwagon, and let’s be honest it’s very fashionable to slate old Moore, but it did make me laugh. My only real problem with Moore is fundamentally artistic – that is he’s about as funny as stepping on glass.

I don’t mean watching someone else step on glass. You’re right Moore, that would be funny.

But what confused me about Oldham was his comments about his attitude to making music. Now think about the following words in relation to Greatest Palace Hits:

“…something should be happening in the recording process for it to feel like it’s a special event. Either the song can be to some extent written at the time of recording, or the guitar part, the one you hear on the record, is the first time you ever hear it played combined with elements that are predetermined, so that it’s not just all improvisation….When you go into the recording studio it seems like there should be no conception of what you’re going to leave with.”

Now I’m not suggesting he will have pre-planned every note that went onto the Greatest Palace Hits – I would be more impressed if that were the case - but compared to Palace or even early Bonnie recordings you couldn’t and wouldn’t want to conceive of that much rehearsal or production. It was always the rambling and amateurish guitar solos that made the recordings so…treasured.

On his early recordings I could never help feeling that maybe I was just listening to a Will Oldham live recording and that essentially I could just nip out and see any band live who hadn’t quite practiced enough to get your Oldham fix. But there was always his voice. A voice so untamed and wild and cracked and timeless. The same feeling I get when hearing Joanna Newsom now.

Alas I wait with similarly baited breath to his forthcoming album with Matt Sweeney, apparently out dead soon. Will I never learn?