Brian Wilson: The creative force behind The Beach Boys and a defining voice of the 60s

The Beach Boys perfectly captured the spirit of the California surf craze. They signed with Capitol Records in 1962 and released their first album, Surfin’ Safari, that same year.

But their best was yet to come and Wilson, a complex, tortured individual who created their unique vocal harmonies, led them to the very peak of musical accomplishment.

He was born in June 1942, two days after Paul McCartney, and began to play the piano and teach his brothers to sing harmony as a young boy.

The Beach Boys started as a neighbourhood act, rehearsing in Wilson’s bedroom and in the garage of their house in suburban Hawthorne, California. Brian played bass while his brother Dennis was the drummer and Carl played lead guitar.

Their debut single, Surfin’, became a minor hit but was nothing compared with the success that followed from their second studio album, Surfin’ USA, released in 1963.

The band was managed at first by the brothers’ father, Murry Wilson, but by mid-decade he had been displaced and Brian, who had been running the recording sessions almost from the start, took charge.

The Beach Boys signed a seven-year contract with Capitol at the urging of staff producer Nick Venet who saw them as the “teenage gold” he had been scouting for.

By May 1964 they had achieved their first American number one single with I Get Around, and unlike many other US groups of the period their popularity was not dented by that of The Beatles.

However, the strain was already beginning to show and in January 1965, tired out by the demands of travelling, composing and producing, Brian announced his withdrawal from the front line to concentrate on songwriting and record production.

Now a full-time studio artist, he wanted to take the band beyond its surfing roots. Taking a tip from the so-called Wall of Sound popularised by fellow producer Phil Spector, he added more instrumentation and introduced double and triple-tracking to make the music sound more intense.

The first result was the 1965 album, Summer Days (and Summer Nights), whose breakout single, California Girls, took them back into the top five.

The band’s creativity reached its peak with the 1966 album Pet Sounds, considered by many critics to be the most influential of the decade after The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper.

Among many soon-to-be standards, the album featured Good Vibrations, composed by Brian with lyrics by Mike Love and characterized by its complex soundscape and subversions of the standard pop music formula.

It took months of tape editing using techniques Wilson was inventing as he went along and was the costliest single ever recorded up to that point.

Although Pet Sounds charted less highly than their previous albums, reappraisal has rendered it one of the pivotal works of the rock era.

It also marked the band’s creative peak and after its release the hits were fewer and further between. Wilson’s follow-up project – a “teenage symphony to God”, he called it – was a piece of virtual performance art called Smile.

For a song about fire, Wilson wore a fireman’s helmet in the studio. His bandmates were conflicted and a shaken Wilson delayed the album, then cancelled it.

Addicted to drugs and psychologically incapacitated, sometimes barely moving from the sandbox he had built in his living room, Wilson’s spark became fitful.

The band’s biggest release of the 1970s was a greatest hits album, Endless Summer, which also helped re-establish them as concert performers.

In recent years, although well enough to record and even tour again, Wilson was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and baffled interviewers with brief and disjointed answers.

Among the stranger episodes of his life was his relationship with Dr Eugene Landy, a psychotherapist accused of holding a Svengali-like power over him.

A 1991 lawsuit from Wilson’s family blocked Landy from Wilson’s personal and business affairs.

Meanwhile, The Beach Boys released occasional hit singles like Kokomo, made without Brian, which reached number one in 1988 on the back of Cocktail, the Tom Cruise movie in which it was featured.

Wilson himself released solo albums with cameos by McCartney and Eric Clapton, among others.

He won only two regular Grammy awards but was given a lifetime achievement Grammy, a tribute at Washington’s Kennedy Center and an induction into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.

His first marriage, to singer Marilyn Rovell, ended in divorce and he became estranged from their daughters Carnie and Wendy, who would help form the pop group Wilson Phillips.

In 1995 Wilson married Melinda Ledbetter, who gave him two more daughters. Melinda died last year.

He also reconciled with Carnie and Wendy and they sang together on the 1997 album, The Wilsons.