“Isn’t their something depressing about sunlight?” asks artist Jeremy Deller in the catalogue accompanying this exhibition. Brian’s sun, for much of his life, was the eclipsed one of Max Ernst’s Cage, Forest and Black Sun 1927 and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia 1992. He wrote The Lonely Sea, a haunting ballad that sounds like a Vija Celmins drawing, at the time his effervescent surf songs were topping the charts.

Notes:

The titles of Kaye Donachie’s paintings come from lyrics to Beach Boys songs: ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ from Pet Sounds 1966 and ‘Never Learn Not to Love’ from 20/20 1969. The latter was based on a song Charles Manson wrote called ‘Cease to Exist’. Shortly before the Sharon Tate and LaBianca murders, Manson and his ‘Family’ lived for a time in Dennis Wilson’s home. Reputedly Dennis himself narrowly missed assassination; Manson was supposedly livid that the Beach Boys had changed his lyrics to something less macabre.

The image that formed the basis of Thomas Demand’s Recorder 2002 - a 35mm film of an animated sculpture constructed entirely from paper - came from a TV documentary on the link between Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson. The soundtrack, by Mark Nelson, samples a fragment from SMiLE known as the ‘Bicycle Rider’.