So Brian Wilson has died. He of the Beach Boys. And thus we reflect. Partly we reflect — those of us of a certain age — on how figures that we have known all our lives survived until the last decade or so (Elizabeth II, almost the entire cast of the BBC in the 1980s, Jeff Beck, etc). I was a child in the 1980s, but the music was feeble, or at least not exciting (deadened by gated drums and drum machines): and so I enjoyed a renaissance of the 1960s by listening to my father’s small collection of reel-to-reel tapes, played on a mono player: Sgt. Pepper, A Hard Day’s Night, The Shadows Greatest Hits, something or other by the Hollies and something or other by the Beach Boys. Well, the Hollies were alright at times; the Shadows were my first musical awakening, and the Beatles my second musical awakening. But the Beach Boys?
Bab Bab Bab, Bab Babaran.
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