The Beach Boys at the Piece Hall in Halifax: Co-founder Mike Love on 60 years of Pet Sounds, Good Vibrations and the poignancy of live performance a year on from Brian Wilson’s death

"I’m right on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu,” he says. “Where a Beach Boy’s supposed to be.”

He is visiting friends in his native Los Angeles County, where in the city of Hawthorne, with his cousins Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, alongside their friend Al Jardine, they formed one of the biggest groups in rock history in 1961.

Love, one of the group’s main vocalists, is 85 now and through continued touring gets to keep taking their music around the world.

"Our audiences are multiple generations now, sometimes entire families will come out, three generations or more. So it's pretty amazing,” he tells The Yorkshire Post. “I just love the way that our songs are appreciated so many years after we originally created them. They bring a lot of joy to people, a lot of happiness – and us as well, we enjoy singing them, and we feel very blessed to be able to do these songs for so many decades and have the kind of response to them that we get.”

The Beach Boys sit alongside a select few musical artists from the 20th century whose music and legacy endure beyond question.

Anniversary milestones happen a lot when you’re that kind of a cultural force but this year marks 60 years of Pet Sounds – as groundbreaking an album one could possibly imagine.

In celebration, Love, who has toured using the band’s name since the late 1990s, has taken The Beach Boys back on the road and will play the Piece Hall in Halifax on Wednesday, June 17.

It comes a year on from the death, on June 11, 2025, of his cousin and the band’s early artistic driver, Brian Wilson – a man often hailed a musical genius.

The cousins had well-documented disagreements but Love has reported that in Wilson’s final days, he went to his bedside and they sang together.

Are the live shows more poignant since he died?

“Yes, it is more poignant,” says Love, but adds that Wilson is “in the music”.

Only he and Al Jardine – who tours with band’s music separately – survive of the original members, as years before their brother Brian, Dennis died in 1983 and Carl passed away in 1998.

Love says: “The Pet Sounds album came out in 1966 and here we are, celebrating it 60 years later, and we're doing several songs from that album at our concert. So Brian and the other guys are always there. When we do God Only Knows, that was done on the Pet Sounds album, the lead was sung by Carl Wilson, and he sang it beautifully. My son, Christian, sings it these days, and he sounds amazing on it as well. So that's the nice thing about music, is it can be reincarnated by other people, but the influence on the audience is much the same, even decades later.”

Other hit songs on the album include Wouldn’t It Be Nice and their version of folk song Sloop John B, but it was the ambitious production and instrumentation, alongside magnificently harmonised vocals, which set it apart from records of the time. Perhaps only The Beatles surpass The Beach Boys for the level of adulation and pored-over folklore from that era. Plenty of words, entire books, have been dedicated to the story of Pet Sounds.

Why does Love believe it was so influential?

At the time, he says, “people would have a song or two on the radio and if it was successful, they would go to the studio and create an album to go with it, to take advantage of the sales of the LPs. So with Pet Sounds, it was a bit different. It was the whole concept and the thematic effort – Brian did these amazing tracks with the best musicians of southern California. If you listen to just the tracks, it's mind blowing what he came up with. And then you listen to the vocals, and that also is incredible. We laboured over those vocals for hours and hours and hours to make them perfect. So I think the album influenced a lot of people to start thinking more comprehensively when it came to their albums.”

Fans can expect to hear more songs than usual from Pet Sounds on this tour, including I’m Waiting for the Day.

"That's a beautiful song,” says Love, who has lived by Lake Tahoe for many years. “The end of the song, vocally, is amazing. It's just a very sensitive song. It really means a lot, I think, to a lot of people who have had their love affairs and stuff that didn't go so well. It means a lot to a lot of people who've had that negative experience in a relationship and then someone comes along, and it's a kind of a healing song. I think it's a beautiful concept to put into music.”

It is also 60 years since the release of the song Good Vibrations, which initially came out later in 1966.

Love has mentioned in previous interviews about the findings last year of Dr Michael Bonshor, course director of Music Psychology in Education, Performance and Wellbeing at the University of Sheffield, whose formula suggested that Good Vibrations was top of the list of songs that made people happiest. I Get Around wasn’t far behind, listed at seventh.

"I thought that was amazing,” says Love. “Out of all those great artists and great songs, to be number one at making people feel good, I think that's an incredible honour to be thought of that highly.”

Love reminds us, though, that it’s not just about nostalgia.

"Those concerts themselves are a great moment and bringing the music to life, it's not just a catalogue of everything - it's a living entity.”

The Beach Boys perform at the Piece Hall in Halifax, with support from 10cc, on June 17. Visit: thepiecehall.co.uk/event/the-beach-boys