It's the mind that conceived that jangling harmony and haunting theremin on Good Vibrations. That delivered God Only Knows, perhaps the best love song ever (and certainly Paul McCartney's favourite). And brought forth the album, Pet Sounds, which moulded bicycle bells, dog whistles, barking dogs and buzzing organs into what Jim Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain once called "so obviously brilliant that it's almost beyond even talking about".

But it's also a mind polluted by years of ingesting industrial-strength quantities of cocaine, LSD, marijuana and benzedrine, and then tangled by the machinations of psychologist Eugene Landy, a figure so controlling he once boasted "I influence all his thinking".

So even before my call is connected to the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, I fear we are destined for a feet-of-clay moment. By the end of our brief conversation, I feel like Nurse Ratched, with Wilson playing the part of a post-ECT Randal McMurphy.

MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS Wilson with his wife, Melinda Ledbetter, at the 73rd Golden Globe Awards in January.

Alexis Petridis spent an hour with him in a London hotel in 2011 for a Guardian profile, and left with the admission that he was no closer to understanding Wilson. "But then," he wrote, "has any interviewer not left Brian Wilson's presence at least slightly disconcerted or confused?"

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GETTY IMAGES Brian and the Beach Boys in their heyday.

Rolling Stone had more fortune last November, principally by teasing revealing quotes from Wilson over the course of two days alongside him as he power-walked around Beverly Hills, watched television and went out for chili dogs, all the while admitting he heard voices in his head and said "I'm anxious, I'm depressed, I get scared a lot".



But I have only 20 minutes, by telephone. Then just 15, with the promise of a nameless manager listening in to ensure I don't stray too far from the nominated topics of Wilson's seminal work, Pet Sounds, and a forthcoming tour, and then, when Wilson cuts me off abruptly, 13.



I saw Wilson on stage in Manchester, in 2004, when he toured to mark the much-delayed completion of the album Smile, some 37 years in the making, interrupted by Landy and the drugs. He was surrounded on stage by what was effectively the best Beach Boys covers band in the world, all hipster glasses and designer jeans, coaxing him along with their best smiles. For the encore, he rose unsteadily to his feet, and strummed along with an electric guitar that from Row W of the stalls, didn't appear to be plugged in. Even then, he looked wobbly, tired and confused. Of Smile, he says in his robotic, quite high-pitched voice, "We figured it was time to finish it. It was ahead of its time. Me and my collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, thought it would be a good idea to finish it up. I thought we did a good job."



Eleven years later, he's now 73, and still touring relentlessly. Why, I ask him, would he bother? "We like to make people happy with our music," he replies, without emotion. "Me and my band, we like to make people happy. That's why we do tours."

And yet, he admits, he still gets the stage fright that has infamously dogged his career. "Yeah, I do. I get stage fright before I go on stage. I get very nervous, nervous as hell. Once I go on stage, I feel better."

Surely his time on stage is coming to an end? "I don't know," he says ponderously. "I don't think I will retire that soon." He still enjoys it? "Yeahhh," he says, uncertainly.

N/A Paul Dano played Wilson in the movie version of his life - a painful experience for the subject.

Otherwise, life seems tranquil. He ignores or doesn't hear a question about what it's like to parent five kids, the youngest of them just five (he also has two grown daughters from his first marriage), at his age. He's just back from an hour's walk in the park when we talk. He doesn't own a phone or have an email address or read newspapers. He watches a lot of television, listens to a lot of "oldies and goodies" from the 1950s and 1960s on the radio and music television - but nothing recent. "It's been a good time," he says. "I am listening to a lot of music, doing a lot of exercise."

What seems clear is that however much Wilson seems to have reached some peace, an ability to keep writing music and lyrics that prevailed despite everything else - even if Wilson's 'bedroom tapes' of the late 1960s and early 1970s were once described as "schizophrenia on tape" - has deserted him. "I haven't written anything for about a year and a half," he admits. "I wrote a lot of songs. But I just went dry. I haven't been motivated or inspired to write music. I probably will [again]. I probably might."

The popular belief is that Wilson's second wife, former car saleswoman and model Melinda Ledbetter, is the one who saved his later years. It was Ledbetter who finally cut the cord to Landy, then became his manager and pushed Wilson as a solo act, leaving founding member Mike Love to tour the Beach Boys name. "She gave me a solo career, she thought about doing a solo career and I've been doing that for 17 years," he says. "I love her. I think she's great." Where would he be without her? "I don't know. I can't answer that question."

Ledbetter is the heroine of the 2015 movie Love and Mercy, which focuses on Wilson's relationship with Landy (played by Paul Giamatti). Wilson walked out of the first screening partway through, although he concedes it was a fair reflection of his troubled life. "It was a rough experience to see what I went through and the drugs that I took. Some of the trips I went through. It brought back a lot of bad memories. Some of the movie also brought back good memories though."

The parts involving Landy were "probably the part that was kind of hard for me to watch". Does he ever think of Landy now? He's perplexed by the question. "Not really, no: he died in about... ten years ago."

Gene Landy, first briefly in 1975, then for six years from 1982 after Wilson overdosed, had a remarkable control on Wilson, forming a company with him, receiving 25 per cent of copyright on a Wilson solo album, allegedly ghostwriting Wilson's now disowned autobiography and becoming the main beneficiary of a 1989 Wilson will. Wilson would say last year: "I thought he was a friend, but he was a very f---d-up man."

Landy did succeed in cutting Wilson's drug use, which had begun in earnest when an LSD trip inspired 1964's California Girls, and included a destructive spell in the early 1970s when he was snorting copious coke, chain smoking, taking LSD and hanging out with Micky Dolenz, Keith Moon and Alice Cooper. He turned up to Moon's 28th birthday in a bathrobe and slippers and chose the same attire to interrupt a set by a jazz musician at a club called the Troubadour to sing 'Be-Bop-a-Lula'. To be generous, I round it up and ask him what he remembers of the entire decade. Foolishly, I make it a double headed question about whether he learned anything from soaking himself in psychedelic drugs for so long. "I learned about.... we recorded a couple of good albums, me and the Beach Boys in the 1970s. And in the 80s, Mike Love wrote a song called Kokomo [a 1988 US number one]. He's pretty good."

Ahah, Mr Love. "Mike is keeping the name alive. He's doing great tours. I've not seen him or talked to him in three and a half years."

Love, his cousin, retains the Beach Boys name and tours with an entirely different line-up: of the originals, Wilson's brothers Carl (lung cancer, 1998) and Dennis (drowning, 1983) are both long dead. Their friend Al Jardine did on-and-off stints with the band.

There was a golden spell, around 1964-66 when Wilson wrote Good Vibrations, God Only Knows, Wouldn't it be Nice, California Girls and so on and while he had already had one nervous breakdown and begun to struggle with performing live, the worst was still ahead. What inspired this brilliance? "The Beach Boys inspired me," he stonewalls. "My brothers and my cousins and my friends inspired me to write music."

Does he regret what happened after those creative years? No. Does he look back to it often? No. I ask again what he learned from that time? "I learned how to be a good person, how to talk with people and stuff like that."

On this tour through Australia and New Zealand, the hook is hearing the entirety of Pet Sounds - considered by most critics to be almost entirely the genesis of Wilson's genius - followed by a wrap of his other greatest hits. "Pet Sounds is probably the greatest album we ever did. And Wouldn't It Be Nice and God Only Knows ... there's some pretty good tunes on there. It brings back happy memories for me." Yes, he says, it's satisfying to see how those songs have endured so long in popular culture.

Inasmuch as he can, Wilson sounds cautiously excited about coming here. "I haven't been there for a while. For a long time. It's going to be a good experience." While he is here, he'd like to see some koalas and kangaroos. He will be escorted by his "right-hand man", a chap named Jerry.

By now, I'm somewhat desperate. It's Wilson himself who rescues me. "This has been a good interview," he declares, despite all the evidence to the contrary. "I gotta go. I got more interviews to do." I can't help but feel that for his own sake, not least that of his interlocutors, he should never conduct another one in his life.