Poetry in slow motion

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.