Poetry in slow motion

Mention the words Brian and Wilson and you understand the male/female divide. Whereas women might shrug, "Oh, the former Beach Boy that went crazy" or "Who?", men will drop their jaws in neo-orgasmic appreciation and tell me, "He’s a genius, a man who changed the world."

A line that came out several times was "Without Brian Wilson, there would be no Sergeant Pepper". Apparently, this means that without Wilson’s innovative, multi-layered musically intense lyrically deep Pet Sounds, the Beatles would never have upped their game and realised there was more to pop music than boy meets girl and has fun.

Wilson reached dizzying heights and acquired accolades of genius that he felt he didn’t deserve or couldn’t maintain. His relationship with the other Beach Boys became explosive. He and his cousin Mike Love still don’t speak. His brothers, Dennis and Carl, have both died, leaving him a surprising survivor after his life was wrecked firstly by too many psychedelic drugs, and then by the lengths he went to just to get through the day. He put his faith, his life, in the hands of a doctor, Eugene Landy, who, yes, turned his life around, but at a heavy cost. Friends say he is still paying the price.

I was warned that he is on heavy medication. None of this prepared me for the strangeness of what it was like to meet Wilson. It was sweet, it was sad, it was uplifting, it was piquant.

The house is in a gated community near Mulholland Drive. It nestles with other sprawling, full-on American homes. It was lit up with a million Christmas lights in red, white and blue, an American flag waving from the deck. I am meeting him to discuss how he got over his stage fright to staging a solo world tour promoting his new album, which comes out on Sanctuary Records on 14 January. He is a man in black, tall, but stooped. He shuffles to meet me. He wants to sit and cover himself with a tartan car rug, which gives the impression that he is an invalid, not a rock star.

He speaks very, very slowly. You can hear the saliva dry in his mouth. His lips hardly move, probably because of his medication.

It is as if his emotional expression was turned inwards so you feel it rather than see it. He has a handsome, sculpted face, but his eyes are sad and piercing. They remind me of a movie in which Ralph Fiennes is tortured to death, strung out on a tree and drenched with water, which froze around him, and you just saw the eyes bleating inside this frozen form.

I tell him I was quite surprised to read that he was touring after decades of stage fright. "It goes," he says wistfully.

"My wife and manager told me I would go over fantastic and I said no dice. They said, ‘Brian, please try it, at least once.’ So they booked a tour [of America]. I got standing ovations and it went over fantastic. I got over stage fright. I didn’t think people would love it, but they did."

There is not an ounce of faux navete here. He has only a vague idea that he might be a genius who changed the world. A genius revered with almost religious fervour, the greatest living legend. "Not the greatest," he says. "One of the greatest."

I can tell I am making him nervous. "Yeah, compliments make me a little bit nervous. I always take it as a negative, that people are putting it on."

What’s the compliment you would most enjoy? "That I am a genius. I love that, when they call me a genius."

Do you believe you are? "Yeah," he says, slowly, after some thought, as if being a genius were everything and nothing. "I have to live up to my name or else I’m gone. If I can’t live up to my name, I shouldn’t live," he says, deadpan.

He is always deadpan, so it is hard to gauge if you are really connecting with him or not, and he is deaf in one ear. I felt like I was talking to an adult pretending to be a child pretending to be an adult. I have given up on the idea of a conversation, but we try.

Do you think all those years ago, when you were first successful, the pressure to live up to what you had achieved made you withdraw? "It scared me a little bit. I clammed up and wasn’t able to, you know, function well. But I got over it. I think life - it wasn’t a life until I started touring." So you have to be on stage to feel alive? "Yes. I had to do the thing I was most scared of."

What were you scared of? "Phil Spector scared me a lot. I was scared I wouldn’t come up to him, so I dropped out."

He is obsessed with the legendary record producer. He runs every morning to turn the negative to positive. "I just keep running and running and thinking, ‘Let’s get over this. Let’s get over this.’"

What is it you want to get over, exactly? "My fear of Phil Spector. I’m afraid of him because of his awesome records. I think Be My Baby is the greatest song ever written and I can listen to it over and over again." (In fact, he does most days.)

But if you love him, why are you afraid of him? "I think love and fear are the same thing, maybe two sides of a coin. I saw him in 1984. My manager took me over to his house. I liked him. I couldn’t help myself. To look at him was a trip."

He probably felt the same about you. "People have told me that. Maybe so."

Suddenly I feel like his therapist or his mother or his nanny. I just want to reach out and fill the big hole with reassurance. It is hard to fathom the greatest living legend living in fear of Phil Spector, but there it is. He says, though, he has worked on his self-belief and found it again.

He says his wife, Melinda, has been his touchstone. "She brought it out of me. ‘It’s time to get off your ass,’ she said. Without her, I couldn’t have done it."

They have been married seven years and have two blonde little girls, Daria and Delanie. "I met her at a Cadillac dealer. She sold Cadillacs and I liked her so much I got her number. We started dating and then we got married. Instant rapport." Believe me, I can’t imagine an instant rapport is possible with Wilson. Nothing in his life is instant. It’s all very, very slow. But he says it was "like that". He snaps his fingers. "I owe my life to her, to Melinda and to my manager, Dave Lee. They both got me going. Superior people."

He seems constantly to be wading through a drug forest. "I used to swing in and out of bad moods. Ever heard of lithium? I don’t take that any more, but it’s similar to that. It keeps you from the highs and lows. You know, I used to be real happy or real sad, so I took medicine for that."

Do you miss the highs? "A little bit."

Can you write music without the highs and the lows? "Yes, but not as well." A long pause. "I’ve always been a survivor. I’ve survived everything."

He claims to have lost the will to self-destruct, although one sees a flicker of that, or a flicker of some former energy. "I have come close, but never quite to the end."

It is easy to see, with this kind of capacity to absorb pain, why he needs looking after. It is easy to see why he would become a guru junkie, looking for saviours, because he is not quite capable of saving himself. Does he understand now that he was easily influenced by the wrong kind of people? "They were taken out of my life," he says, referring to Landy as if he had no part in organising the restraining order to remove him. He was in Landy’s total care for nine years. He lived with him. "He was my manager, friend, doctor, all in one." A bit risky, having all those eggs in one basket. "Right, but he was quite the man. I haven’t seen him in ten years."

Was it a mutual break-up in any way? "Yes. Well, there was a restraining order against him."

Do you miss him? "Very much so, yes."

Do you want to reverse the restraining order? "I might be able to. I’m considering that kind of thing. I don’t know for sure."

What will you say to him? You must have a lot to say. I am thinking along the lines of: Why did protection become control, why did you try to take over my life, claim writing credits on songs? And why did Landy end up as the main beneficiary of Wilson’s will, with 70 per cent of Wilson’s money going to him and another ten per cent to his girlfriend? But Wilson astounds me.

"Well, yes, of course I have a lot to say. I would like to say, ‘I love you so much and I thank you so much.’"

Do you love him? "Yes, I did. I don’t know if I do now but I did."

What do you think went wrong? "Too controlling and he lost his licence."

People who are protective are also controlling and sometimes you do not know the difference. "Yeah," he says, with a huge sadness, but I am not really sure what he is sad about.

He talks not fluidly, but deeply, out of a fog, but strangely direct, intense because his words are so spare. In his programme with Landy, he was monitored every 20 minutes. Landy had control of his life legally through the commitment of his then wife because he had gotten very low with drugs and was in a terrible state mentally and physically. It cost more than $100,000 (70,000) because he charged "a hell of a lot per month".

One of the ways he used to fill up the space inside was eating. He says conspiratorially: "You don’t know this, but I weighed 311 pounds at one time. Isn’t that funny?"

How did you get that big? "I just kept eating birthday cake for breakfast and no exercise at all. I felt pains in my heart. I was ready to die and the doctor (Landy) saved my life. He got me on a good diet, running and walking and working with weights and I went down to 184 pounds. That was 20 years ago. I weigh 225 now, but in half a year, I lost 110 pounds. I lost half my person. I lost my self-consciousness about being fat. Everywhere I’d go out I’d put a pillow over my stomach or hide, or say ‘I can’t talk to you now’ because of my weight."

Do you think you ate so much because you couldn’t face the world or you couldn’t face the world because you had eaten so much? " The first one. I ate so much because I didn’t want to face the world, but I went in six months to the shape of an Olympic champion and I was on a songwriting programme as well."

Put like that, it’s easy to see why he hero-worshipped Landy. He gave him his life back only to take it away again. What went wrong? "He became too power-conscious, power-mad. He would yell at me and the people that worked with me. He became a terror and I couldn’t tell him to go away. I was totally dependent on him."

Do you think your life’s so much more balanced now that it would be good to see him? "Within the next few months, yeah." He starts singing Reunited.

What else do you want to say to him? "Let’s rock." He smiles. He doesn’t smile easily.

Do you fear or look forward to his response? "I fear rejection. I would have done it before now, but I feel I would be rejected if he came back into my life. It’s a fear I have, but what you’re scared of you should deal with or it deals with you," he says, in a monotone. Yet it somehow seems all the more profound coming from him.

Is there anything that you want to change about your life? "Nothing. It’s perfect."

And achieve? "I would like to be one of the biggest music attractions in the United States. I would like to rise to a higher fame. Growth is good."

His little girl runs in wearing a pink ballet dress and wants to be told a story. It seems that he is more relaxed with her than with anybody.

Does he miss the other Beach Boys? "No. I’ve had a lot of trouble with my cousin and Carl died. That’s one of the reasons we don’t talk. He was a pretty good singer. I can’t get in touch with him. I reach out for him and he’s not there. I think you can touch dead people, but you have to be as sensitive as hell about it."

I think you’re really sensitive. "As all hell I am, yeah. I’m an artist with a sensitive little soul and it gets hurt a lot. I can’t explain it in words." I don’t know if he ever could. That’s why he had music and that’s why he runs and runs every morning, to keep out the "bad feelings" that come into his soul.

He plays the piano an hour a day and likes to watch the news and phone his friends. His best friend is his manager, Lee. "We go out to eat twice a week, my wife and I and him and his wife. I eat cajun rib-eye steak. I love restaurants. You’re sitting there and all of a sudden, there’s food. It’s like magic."

It seems he hasn’t let go of meat and potatoes as a form of comfort. "Yes, it’s emotional security and a ritual that I love. That’s why I exercise, to stop the comfort eating. It’s my obsession. That, and Phil Spector."

He does say he was thrilled to death

when Paul McCartney told the press his favourite song was God Only Knows. He took only an hour to write it. Where did it come from? Was it about a person? "No. It came from God. I never write a song about a person, except So Glad I Married A Girl Called Marilyn. That was my first wife. Unfortunately, I don’t see her anymore because my wife doesn’t want me to. She doesn’t want me around her. She’s jealous. I don’t mind anyway."

Do you see your daughters, Carnie and Wendy (once part of a singing group, Wilson Phillips, with Chynna, daughter of the Mamas and the Papas singer John Phillips). "I worked with them in the studio. I wrote two or three songs for them and they never released them, but they are theirs and no-one can take them away from them. Those songs are forever," he says. The voice is still monotone, but it is as if somewhere behind the voice he is saying that there is a love forever that might come out one day.

Are you still in touch with them? "Not as much. We drifted apart. It got intense, so we had to go our separate ways. We couldn’t cope with each other. I felt guilty about not being a good father to them and they hated me for it. We had to make the best of it. I gave them beautiful songs."

Didn’t that solve anything? "It did for a while, then it stopped solving it."

Does it worry you? "A little bit. I’ll think of something, some magic formula that will work." But you get the impression that nothing will work in the immediate future. "I said I can’t take anymore."

He cannot really explain why. I don’t know if he ever knew, or if it is buried beneath the lithium-like field. Meanwhile, he tries to get energy by listening to Bach and his little daughters singing. "They have great voices," he says. Must be in their genes, I say. "No. They’re adopted."

He says he didn’t grow up wanting to be a musician, but an athlete. "I’m very competitive. I wanted to be a New York Yankee. Then I started thinking about music. "

I imagine that the fresh-faced, sunny California sound of surfing that imbued the Beach Boys’ early songs was all about his love of life, his love of outdoors and, of course, his love of surfing, but he has a fear of swimming. "I almost drowned one time and then I never swam again."

So much for him embodying an era of the Kennedys and of the American dream. It seems sad to think of all those fun, fun, fun pop anthems, the Beach Boys tapping into a potent macho source of surfing, and he doesn’t even swim.

He says it takes him months sometimes to complete a song. "My energy is not where it was when I was 23. My circuit breakers go off. I’ll be writing a song and I will shut off automatically, but now, instead of going, ‘God damn, why can’t I write?’, I just say that’s enough for today. I don’t shoot for the stars as much as I used to and I would like to change my attitude. People are always telling me I have a bad attitude." By this he means, "I’ve been mad at some people for a couple of years and I’m having trouble forgiving them, but if I had a good attitude, it would help me get over it, and I don’t think about sex as much as I should. I’m really sorry to say that, but it’s not my bag."

Do you have to force yourself to think about it? "I’m celibate and live for the moment of joy when I make music, when I listen to music, when I listen to Phil Spector’s records, but the joy of sex has diminished from my life. I’ll get it back but I’m just in a slow period. I want to get it back because I love it."

I’m somewhat at a loss for words because the sex thing had come out of nowhere and you really don’t think of him as a sexual being. He continues: "It goes away for about a month and then I get it back. I have sex once a month." Doesn’t your wife go crazy? "No. She’s in the same bag as I am. She’s that way."

Some moments later, the immaculately denimed blonde wife returns and hugs him hotly. I thought, you wouldn’t be hugging him like that if you knew what he just told me about not having sex.

Then we go upstairs to his grand piano, a Yamaha, and as a tribute to George Harrison, he starts playing My Sweet Lord, and singing with a voice that is sweet and in pain. It was quite a moment. He moves on to Love and Mercy Tonight and it was particularly poignant, not because he is so good at it, but just that he can do it at all.

Such a mixture of frail and strong. You want to put your arms around him and hug him. You feel comforted by him, too.

Brian Wilson performs at the Armidilo, Glasgow on 23 January. Tel: [phone]