The 1970s were a strange time to be a kid. The world was caught between post-hippie naivety and the gritty realities of economic crisis, cultural shifts, and state intervention into our personal lives. For me, growing up in suburban Australia, the soundtrack to this era was Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, a band whose harmonies infected the lives of my father and uncle, even in a land far from California’s endless summer.

I can still recall Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains playing on the tape deck as we headed to Apple Tree Bay on the Hawkesbury in a red Kombi van with a 14-foot tinnie in tow. The week before we’d been to the big Salvos at Tempe to buy old army greatcoats. It was hairtail season and the middle of winter was when they were on. We’d start by catching yellowtail off the jetty with single hooks and thin lines. Years later in Far North Queensland, the cast net had us marvelling at how much easier it would have been to catch bait if they were legal in NSW.

In the freezing cold, the Beach Boys were a strange companion. It wasn’t just music, their sound blaring in the Kombi van’s speakers lifted us above the cold. Wilson, the troubled genius, crafted songs that felt like they were written for dreamers like me, kids who hadn’t seen a surfboard in real life but could feel the pull of the ocean in their bones, especially while listening to the transistor radio out at the mouth of the Hawkesbury near Lion Island after midnight on a school night.

Surfer Girl wasn’t just an anachronism in-waiting to be banned today, the sound represented a yearning for a world where everything was warm and awesome, even if the reality was a three-bedroom redbrick house with a Hills Hoist in the backyard. My mother wasn’t a surfer girl. She wore her hair in the style of the Ronettes. Until recently, I didn’t know Phil Spector’s trademark sound in Be My Baby was reflected in Wilson’s Don’t Worry Baby, or where my Mum’s hairstyle came from.

I didn’t know that I Can Hear Music, my favourite Beach Boys song, was originally recorded by the Ronettes in 1966, or that it was Carl Wilson, not Brian, who made it happen using Brian’s studio style. For all Brian’s perfectionism and deteriorating mental health, he was truly gifted.

Wilson’s genius lay in his ability to uplift one’s spirits, even though his were deeply troubled. His music took Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound to new levels of aural architecture with a complexity that still hits me right in the soul. I didn’t hear the words, only the sounds. As a kid, I didn’t know what a theremin was, but I felt its eerie wail in my nervous system. The ultimate was when John Travolta, as my other childhood hero, Vinnie Barbarino, sang Barbara Ann as ‘Bar, Bar, Bar, Bar, Bar-barino!’

Wilson wasn’t just writing songs. He was building worlds.

The Beach Boys were everywhere in the 1970s, even in Australia. Their music spilled out of our AM radio, blared from our Kombi van, and echoed at our backyard barbecues. Songs like Fun, Fun, Fun and California Girls were anthems of a mythical America that was sunlit, carefree, and impossibly cool.

I didn’t know about Wilson’s struggles with mental health, the band’s internal tensions, or the weight of trying to stay relevant in a world divided between disco and heavy rock. As a kid, I didn’t understand the context, but I felt it. The music was a bridge between innocence and something heavier, something I’d only grasp years later. While my father and my uncle continued to listen to the Beach Boys, I moved on to Bon Scott and Angus Young as every other kid did in outer Western Sydney.

What strikes me now, looking back, is how Brian Wilson’s music was part of my day.

There’s a scene in the movie Love and Mercy where a young Wilson drills the cellists over and over to get the right sound for Good Vibrations. I watched it again last night and couldn’t help wondering at all the parts that made up the sum of Wilson’s work.

Then last week, he was gone.

As I write this, I’m struck by how much of my childhood was shaped by Brian Wilson’s sounds. The Beach Boys weren’t just a band, they were a feeling, a memory, a tether to a time when the world seemed simpler, even if it never really was. Brian Wilson’s genius wasn’t just in his music but in his ability to make kids like me believe in the endless summer, no matter where we were. And for that, I’ll always be grateful.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.