The Beach Boys

Anybody expecting a Peter Jackson Get Back style documentary will be disappointed.

Visually this is very poor. Old photos and films have all been seen before in countless other documentaries on the Beach Boys and generally, apart from some recent interviews, there is nothing new at all. In fact there is so much that is not in-cluded that should have been.

It would have been interesting if the early days and their first four albums (1962-1963) were covered in some depth.

The same applies to the Wild Honey/Friends/20-20/Sunflower period. These hardly get a mention or the fact that some material from the abandoned Smile album was included on these albums.

Any compilation of hits by the Beach Boys is inevitably going to focus on the early days and the "Californian Dream", and as such, more time should have been spent on the surf/hot rod/girl music of that period.

The shelving of Smile made no mention of a well aired opinion that after hearing Sgt. Pepper, Brian Wilson felt his Smile project was not suitable as a Beach Boys album. He expressed this view in the documentary but then they released Smiley Smile which was even less representative of their music culture.

The last album mentioned was Holland, but the Beach Boys made 10 studio albums after that and these do not include Brian Wilson finally releasing a version of Smile in 2004.

After the confusing Carl and the Passions album (not mentioned), they made Surf's Up, an important album that barely gets a mention. The same with Holland.

No mention is made of the deaths of Dennis and Carl, the true state of Brian's mental health and the fact he reportedly spent three years in his room sleeping, smoking and taking drugs is not covered at all. Neither is the piano in a sandbox or how he was treated and manipulated by a psychologist in the mid-1970s.

Overall, a missed opportunity. I am left with the impression that is was made on the cheap and relies on the Beach Boys name to sell the documentary.