The Beach Boys at Poble Espanyol, July 2012, live review. (Originally published in the Stool Pigeon magazine)

(A quick 2023 intro: I spend a lot of my time thinking about bests, worsts and top tens — the habits of a typical music journalist of a certain age, perhaps. Among these frequent ponderings is: what is the best concert I have ever been to? Kraftwerk at the Brixton Academy in 2004 pops up frequently in my thoughts; as does Brian Wilson performing Smile at London’s Royal Festival Hall in the same year. But my answer to this question — not that anyone else is asking it, sadly — is The Beach Boys at Barcelona’s Poble Espanyol in July 2012. It was part of their 50th Anniversary Reunion Tour, which saw Brian back with the live band, and The Smile Sessions still loomed large in my listening habits. Plus, my wife was pregnant with our first child. So it was a great time for a gig, which perhaps explains why it has lingered so long in my mind. I wrote up the concert for The Stool Pigeon, a brilliantly anarchic British music newspaper that would sadly fold less than a year later. I don’t think they ever put it online, though, which is an indication of both how long ago 2012 is and The Stool Pigeon’s perhaps slightly lax attitude to online media. (I’m pretty sure they themselves admitted this.) So, with the editor’s permission, I posted it on my blog in August of the the same year. I’m re-posting it now on Medium because it looks a lot nicer here and I would love some more people to read it. I’m kind of surprised, looking back at the review , that it wasn’t even more positive. I remembering really, <a href="https://bencardew.medium.com/the-beach-boys-at-poble-espanyol-july-2012-live-review-62021d9a4a2f">Read More</a>