it's one of her very favourite songs.

I'm not fussed about it one way or the other.

...(I can't stand their surf sh*te).

Heroes & Villains is one of the best pop records ever made, however.

You may not like it but, it's not tuneless. It has several tunes.

Often going on simultaneously.

There's very little bass which makes them sound fluffy and sickly sweet. I always assumed that was due to Brian's bad ear but some of their material is truly superb.

If Good Vibrations is playing it's hard to imagine there has ever been a a better song, it shimmers the way a long ago day down the beach does in your memory. It captures the feel of summer.

That's not even my favourite song of theirs, that would be God Only Knows. They are very tinkly though.

Absolutely outstanding

… as to why the Beach Boys were so revered and I just couldn’t get into Pet Sounds.

But then I heard the Sunflower LP and thought it was great and went on from there - my current favourite of their LPs is Friends.

At the risk of sounding pretentious I think the arrangements and melodies are very subtle and restrained compared to most popular music and take a bit of time to adapt to. I now ‘get’ Pet Sounds and I find that the records seem to get better and reveal new delights the more I listen.

As a lifelong cynic and misanthrope I still say one must have a heart of stone not to be moved by this gorgeous music. Best middle eight ever?

Matthew 21:16: Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?

try listening to it with headphones. And I don't mean the shitty things you get with an MP3 player, and I don't mean the grubby streaming feed from YouTube; borrow the CD and listen to it properly; there is a world of beauty inside those tracks, I promise you.

..sorry, but those whiny harmonies really grate. There is also the conservatism (see the awful Student Demonstration song and the "happy we're married" waffle that passes for lyrics on Pet Sounds). And when they did experiment (Smiley Smile, Good Vibrations) they irratated in equal measure (see Vegetables and the aforementioned Heroes and Villians)

..that said sometimes, but only sometimes, the whiny harmonies and naive lyricism found their way into songs that sound like they were beamed in from heaven.

So: God Only Knows, Don't Worry Baby, Don't Talk Put Your Head on My Shoulder, I Just Wasn't Made For These Times and Wating For the Day are all utterly sublime.

But I wouldn't be too bothered if I never heard any of their other offerings again..

...I can't imagine thinking that the sublime Heroes & Villains is 'tuneless', but try this bargain from amazon on for size.
It contains plenty of non-essentials but for the price it's amazing.
If you don't find a few you like in there I'll be very surprised indeed.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Vibrations-Thirty-Years-Beach/dp/B001S0KEMK...

song from the Beach Boys' Surf's Up LP. One of the most beautiful songs ever committed to vinyl:

if I let you have ELO - you're gonna have to let me have Les Garcons de la Plage.

They are fab. Fabber than those Fabs. Imho. A larger amount of brilliantly crafted songs. More good ones. And experimentation. And innnovation. A fair amount of complete cobblers too - probably more than that other lot to be fair. But I loves 'em. And I particularly loves this

"Feel Flows"

Nobody sounded like them. They had real soul. They wrote heartfelt lyrics about growing up, kids, love, and the joys of nature. They sang like angels. They wrote stonking tunes. And they had a great sense of humour. They were the real deal. If you don't like 'em, fair enough. But for me at least, life without the Beach Boys would be a barren world indeed.

Here's another favourite that will, no doubt, fail to convince.

Surprise no one's mentioned the Wild Honey album yet. Particularly this brilliant Stevie Wonder cover (is the line really "I was knee high to a chimp"?):

It's Pop music not tax returns spotify is full of tunes listen to them instead.

The Kokomo Hitmakers had such a bizarre and complicated career it is easy to see why some of The Massive find them a bit hard to take.

They spent most of the late 1970s and 80s enthusiastically p**sing on their own legacy, touring as a horribly distorted Hollywood re-make of their 1960s selves with bikini clad dancers, bouncing beach balls, pony-tailed session musos and badly fitting Hawaiian Shirts. They posed with Ronnie and Nancy, engaged in a lot of patriotic flag waving, got a taste for lawsuits and generally behaved like the abusive, dysfunctional family they were.

I hated the Beach Boys during my formative years, especially "that surfing sh*t". Then, as a student in the early 90s I read an NME review of the 'Good Vibrations' box set, and noted that one of my favourite albums of the time Primal Scream's 'Screamadelica' was heavily influenced by Pet Sounds and the BBs 70s output. I eventually got both and was hooked.

Had they completed the Smile album, turned up to play Monterey (they were invited), had trustworthy people like Neil Aspinall and Brian Epstein to look after them, had Brian Wilson not done quite so many drugs, had they perhaps called it a day with 'Holland', had they been more of a cohesive 'group' rather than warring brothers and had they kicked Mike Love off the tour bus back in 1962...they could have been as universally revered as the HJHs are today.

But maybe it's better that way. Lets enjoy them with all their flaws, Mike Love's 'beard and turban combo', the horrendous business decisions, the infighting, the inane lyrics like "If Mars had Life on It, I might find my wife on it". After all, without all that we would never have had the bugged eyed proto-electro-pop lunacy of 'The Beach Boys Love You'.

The fun of appreciating the BBs is finding the sparkling gems amid the confused dross. Almost every album has at least one swoonsome track on it, and flashes of pure genius.

A few late-period BB gems here:
http://open.spotify.com/user/drvolume/playlist/4Q0FQp9tz0GCwiXOfnfzGY

BBC 4 has a Beach Boys night next Friday starting @ 9pm.

21:00–22:00
Legends
Dennis Wilson: The Real Beach Boy
Profile of Dennis Wilson, the drummer in the Beach Boys, who drowned aged just 39.

22:00–23:00
Pet Sounds: Brian Wilson Live in London
The Beach Boys' classic 1966 album performed live at London's Royal Festival Hall. (R)

23:00–00:20
Imagine
Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson's Smile
The story of the Beach Boys album Smile, recorded in 1966 but not released until 2004. (R)

Thirty Years of the Beach Boys 5cd box set available for£3.69 on Amazon download site at the moment.

He's not well but I think the fragile voice just improves this song.

I couldn't stop playing this track when I first heard it.

A bit like how some of the early Beatles albums are overlooked in favour of their later, more clever-dick stuff, I think the great under-appreciated BB masterpiece is The Beach Boys Today! It's sort of prequel to Pet Sounds and IMHO just as good. Covers the same beat: what's going on in teenagers' heads when they're running through the assault course of adolescent romance, growing up, all that. And, I say, they cover it better than a lot of supposedly more sophisticated writers do.

Here's the album on spotify with the great Guess I'm Dumb in place of a daft filler, as it would have been at the time had Brian not given to Glen Campbell.

http://open.spotify.com/user/rdjl/playlist/7tPrDIitceFxV40pQy70Au

but this is one of my favourite songs. Caroline No...

I've just got through the Good Vibrations set. What a long, strange trip it was. Was there another band that straddled such vertiginous highs and such sub-oceanic depths over the course of a career? I haven't got a pie chart yet, but I'd estimate that roughly a third of it is imperishable music which I'll happily be listening to for the rest of my life. About a 5th is naive and disposable; about another 5th is so bad (specifically the lyrics) that you can only sigh and bewail the decision-making and quality control processes. The rest is intriguing and often very poignant. Some of the later stuff has faint echoes of their greatness, sometimes very deliberately: I think it's Getcha Back which is a carbon copy of Do It Again.

One thing that stands out for me at a first listen (in many cases) is that plenty of the material which was to have made up Smile is, erm, complete and utter twaddle. Wind Chimes? Vegetables? Do You Like Worms??

Many thanks to whoever it was who alerted us to the bargain on Amazon, which I see has now gone.