Brian Wilson's musical career has passed through many stages - from the highest points to the deepest troughs of despair. Now the 62-year-old survivor is back with a record which has been 37 years in the making. He talks to Prime Time's Andrew White

FEW albums have had as traumatic a genesis as Smile, the Beach Boys' legendary "lost" follow-up to Pet Sounds.

Brian Wilson, the genius who had transformed the Beach Boys from purveyors of feelgood, sunshine-splashed pop to the Beatles' only serious creative rivals, was halfway through the recording of his "teenage symphony to God" when his world caved in.

Despite the ecstatic nature of the music he was making - Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains were two of the songs to have featured in the album's provisional track-listing - Wilson was a far from happy man.

In 1964, stress had led him to retire from touring with the band and concentrate on writing and producing their records instead.

Two years later, in response to the release of the Beatles' Rubber Soul, he started work on Pet Sounds - an album he hoped would match the Beatles every inch for sonic innovation and emotional maturity.

Having achieved precisely what he set out to (Paul McCartney even hailed God Only Knows, one of Pet Sounds' many spiritually uplifting tracks, as his favourite song ever), there was no chance for Wilson to rest on his laurels as the Beatles, themselves spurred on to greater things by the glorious Pet Sounds, threw down their next challenge: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

That was when Wilson came up with the idea for Smile - an album that would be the purest expression yet of his art and his soul.

But after several months of intense work with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, and with the weight of the world's expectations on his shoulders, Brian abandoned the project.

The combination of LSD, over-work and the pressure to deliver like never before was just too much.

"I retired for about three months. I didn't do anything. It was hard for me to live up to my name," says Wilson, who maintained his creative links with the Beach Boys but shunned publicity and retreated into a world of his own.

In recent years, the revered writer, producer, arranger and performer, surely one of the most influential composers of the last 50 years, has returned to the public arena and talked openly about his troubled past, which reduced him to a state of helpless, child-like inertia, to the point where he built a sandpit in his living room and spent the best part of a decade in his pyjamas.

Last year, he delighted fans by going out on tour with Pet Sounds. Now he has started another round of live dates.

"I figured it was time for people to hear it," says the 62-year-old, who is now delighting in the praise being heaped on his all-new studio recording of Smile.