Paul Weller on The Beach Boys’ most overlooked masterpiece
All of Paul Weller‘s musical endeavours across The Jam, The Style Council, and his numerous solo records since the 1990s have been spiked with an affection for yesteryear’s big names. From mod revivalism, an unabashed delve into soul, then the ’60s pop stylings of The Kinks and Small Faces in his latter output, Weller’s back-catalogue is a chequered body of work forever seeking inspiration from the artists of his youth.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2005, Weller listed off his ’12 must-have CDs’, reeling off some expected records by The Zombies, Stevie Wonder, Nick Drake, and Sly & The Family Stone. When rifling through his Beach Boys collection, he highlighted a curiously overlooked LP from their voluminous discography.
”I was tempted to put down Pet Sounds, but you always see that on lists,” Weller confessed. Singling out 1968’s Friends, Weller bestowed particular praise: “I think this is an underrated album, but it’s got lovely tunes like ‘Anna Lee, The Healer’ and ‘Little Bird'”.
Their 14th studio album, Friends, was dropped at an odd time for The Beach Boys, both in terms of their artistic relevance with the rapidly shifting musical climate around them, as well as the internal malaise that struck the once tight creative unit. In two short years, sometime frontman and production visionary Brian Wilson was pushing the pop medium to new and innovative sonic terrain, borrowing Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound density with his own increasingly adventurous arrangements and instrumentation.
Wilson’s studio wizardry reached its apex with ’66’s ‘Good Vibrations’, an immaculate marriage of sunny California vocal harmonies and alien soundscapes, which all added to the “genius” press adoration, Wilson’s mythos fuelling great anticipation for the upcoming Smile opus. Fraying mental health and paranoia over its recording sessions resulted in the compromised Smiley Smile, a charming little LP with lo-fi eccentricity and mellow surreality which delivered unassuming greatness, if not the masterpiece pop marvel that had been promised.
Musical trends were shifting at a remarkable pace around them. Following Wild Honey, their lowest-selling album to that point, Friends was dropped during a period of low countercultural standing with their peers. Its easy-going pop triggered confusion in a music press enamoured with the rock’s veer into heavier, politically charged urgency and scrutiny of a band’s ‘authenticity’.
“Friends came out just after Hendrix and Cream,” Bruce Johnston told Mojo in 2007. “The whole country had discovered drugs, discovered words, discovered Marshall amplifiers, and here comes this feather floating through a wall of noise.”
Friends‘ gentle pop vanished in a sea of protest, civil unrest, and Vietnam’s napalm fury, and alienated the new base they’d courted who dug their experimentalism. Retrospective opinion has been kinder, Friends‘ standing among The Beach Boys’ work growing among their dedicated fanbase and praised for its idiosyncratic approach to pop craft. Weller counts himself such an admirer, proudly boasting a picture of himself with Wilson backstage at 2018’s Victoria Festival on social media, an unusual snap for the fact that they’re both grinning ear to ear, likely admirers of each other’s work.
