The Beach BoysIn the 2024 Disney-produced documentary The Beach Boys, Al Jardine describes the first time he sang with Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, and their cousin Mike Love. "We just clicked. Like notes on a keyboard."
When you take one note out of that keyboard, away from the context its owner and the listener have known, push it nearly seventy years into the future and build a concert around it, it’s a tall order. Jardine, now 83, was one of the strongest singers in one of the best-known bands of the last century.
Contractually forbidden by Love from using The Beach Boys' name to promote this concert or on any of the merchandise, doing a brisk trade from the front counter, you can almost see the trials Al "Keep it Clean" Jardine has undergone. The band behind him were, for the most part, selected by Brian Wilson before his death in 2025, so, despite the joy that greets Jardine and the band's arrival, a poignant air hangs over the show.
From simplistic mythologising of Los Angeles' early 60s surfer culture through the frequently transcendent lysergic debacle of Wilson's concept albums at the end of that decade, to the late 1970s overlooked masterpiece Love You, tonight's concert is a validation not only of Jardine as a performer but, as he frequently reminds us, of his bandmate Brian's songwriting genius.
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
Opening with a crowd-rousing California Girls, Jardine and his 11-piece band work hard to make the songs sound as close to authentic as possible. Just as remarkable as the musicianship are the arrangements, courtesy of Wondermints member and long-time Brian Wilson collaborator Darian Sahanaja.
The second track Do it Again, the band's callback to that earlier summer surf image, is an early indication that the songs will be sequenced for theme as much as chronology. To this end, Jardine, wearing a floral print shirt and beige chinos and speaking with the air of a primary school principal, introduces each song with a recollection of its composition, or in some cases, a tangentially related story.
Catch a Wave, Hawaii and Surfer Girl conclude the surf-theme opening batch. "This next song was the first song I remember Brian writing, maybe the first song he ever wrote," Jardine says to an audience of ardent fans holding their tongues, ready to forgive any misremembering or inaccuracy. "It's a beautiful song, one of his most beautiful. It's called Don't Worry Baby. Let's play it".
Sahanaja has a voice that is uncannily close to Carl Wilson's, and Jardine's son, Matt, takes on Brian Wilson's soaring and distinctive falsetto. Don't Worry Baby is the first time that Matt’s is out front, unadorned. No one, not even another Wilson, could match Brian's voice and his interpretation of the song he wrote, one that has been considered among the greatest pop songs ever written since its release in 1964, but Matt’s comes remarkably close.
The older Jardine comes and goes from the microphone, occasionally glancing at a lyric screen by his feet, amidst the music and happy to be there. "That last song was a song about cars, and a relationship in a car," he explains. "We also did songs about cars, like this next one."
Little Deuce Coupe and I Get Around follow, and get a loud response from the audience, many of whom are here for the Gold FM version of the Beach Boys, not the Brian Wilson-writing-his-way-out-of-depression bedroom symphonies, like In My Room and much of Pet Sounds, but it is these songs that really come to life tonight, relying as they do, on arrangements and the band's considerable skills.
Heroes and Villains, one of the strangest and most complex songs in the Beach Boys' catalogue, gets a thrillingly faithful interpretation. It is at this point in the set that Jardine asks something of the audience that few are prepared to give. Presented with the whole back catalogue of one of the greatest bands in history, he elects to run, track by track, through their obscure 1977 album Love You.
Contributors to the Reddit page r/TheBeachBoys are prepared for this and enthusiastically welcome the absolute banger opening track Let Us Go On This Way, but for the next half an hour, the response from the contingent in the crowd who shout "play Barbara Ann!" over and over again is muted. Jardine refers to Love You as "a masterpiece. It's an album we did later in our career, and no one really liked it at the time, but Brian did."
The band move through weirdly time-specific odes to Johnny Carson and The Solar System and play songs introduced by Jardine with delightfully baffling statements like "did you ever have a Ding Dang moment? A moment where you just said, 'Ding Dang!'? This is a song called Ding Dang", and "this next one is one of Brian's weird ones. Hoo boy. Probably none of you have ever heard it, it's called Honkin' Down the Highway". Even if you have no idea what he's on about, it works because Jardine is so in love with these songs and the band is so in love with interpreting and performing them.
Which makes it all the stranger when Jardine introduces Airplane with, "we're getting on an aeroplane in a couple of days and flying north. Don't go north. Not until we have a new president," to cheers and one distant but notable boo. In another moment, Jardine begins sharing a story about a time that bandmate Bruce Johnston had locked them out of the studio and stuck a sign that read “No Beach Boys Allowed” on the door. “So,” he concludes, “we went and recorded Disney Girls. So, let’s play it,” before being interrupted by his son. “This is not that song,” says Matt. “This song is Good Time.”
From there, the band pivots into the heartbreaking genius of Pet Sounds and the song that Jardine brought to Brian Wilson, the folk song Sloop John B. Jardine began in the white, clean-cut late-1950s folk scene and pushed the Beach Boys in that direction early on, and this song, which he adapted into a children's book, is clearly dear to him. As is God Only Knows, Caroline No, and I Know There's an Answer, which gets restarted after Jardine accidentally sings a verse of the song's original lyrics, Hang On to Your Ego. "There's too many cooks on the stage," he jokes. "There's too many songs in the set!" laughs Matt.
I wept at Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds and Smile tours twenty-something years ago and winced at the Beach Boys' 50th Anniversary concert in 2012. Al Jardine and the Pet Sounds Band, like that Disney documentary, is all about having a good time. There are a lot of darker and sadder aspects to the band that Wilson couldn't help but bring when he performed these songs, but tonight we're seeing that story through Jardine, and it is everything he wants it to be. The set closes with Wouldn't It Be Nice and Good Vibrations which, like the softer songs from Pet Sounds, suffer slightly from overenthusiastic drumming.
Tonight is also a hometown show for one of the members of the band. Melbourne singer-songwriter Lewis Coleman plays keyboards, percussion and provides backing vocals and earns maybe the biggest cheer of the night when he is introduced before the encore. The audience rises to their feet as the band closes with a medley of Help Me Rhonda, Surfin’ USA and Fun, Fun, Fun, in which Coleman and keyboardist Debbie Shair circle each other laughing and dancing, and Jardine, the ringleader, at its centre, smiles.
