At 83, still singing California Girls note for note – Al Jardine is coming to Australia, and he’s bringing Brian Wilson’s band

It is three in the afternoon in Scottsdale, Arizona, when Beach Boy Al Jardine picks up the phone. He is warm in the way that people are when they genuinely enjoy talking to strangers. He has been doing interviews for weeks – the Australian tour is coming, the tickets are selling, and people want to know how one of the founding members of the greatest pop group America ever produced is feeling about life at 83.

“My glasses are full when I’m out on the road playing gigs,” he says, when asked the glass-half-full question. “My life is my working. I get to sing most nights with my son – who has an amazing voice.”

That son is Matt Jardine, who handles lead vocals on Good Vibrations, God Only Knows, Don’t Worry Baby and Surf’s Up with the Pet Sounds Band. Anyone who has heard him knows that Al is not being a proud father when he says Matt has an amazing voice. He has the same luminous falsetto that made the original Beach Boy recordings sound as though they were made somewhere slightly outside of ordinary human experience. The family business, it turns out, runs deep.

The beginning — and the departure that almost changed everything

Al Jardine’s story with the Beach Boys is unusual because it very nearly wasn’t a story at all.

He was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1942, and moved with his family to Hawthorne, California, in the mid-1950s, where he met Brian Wilson at Hawthorne High School – they were teammates on the football team, with Brian as backup quarterback and Al as fullback. That friendship, formed on a suburban California gridiron, led eventually to the most consequential musical partnership of his life.

When the Beach Boys formed at the Wilson home in 1961, Jardine was there from the beginning – playing stand-up bass on their very first recording, Surfin’, and helping shape the harmonies that would define the band’s sound. But then, in a decision that would seem inexplicable from the outside except that it made complete sense to the 19-year-old making it, he left. Jardine departed before the band released their debut album – Surfin’ Safari in 1962 – to pursue his studies, before returning in 1963 as the band’s bassist.

It is one of the great footnotes in rock and roll history – the founding member who almost missed the whole thing because he went back to college. He came back, of course, and what he came back to was nothing less than the transformation of American popular music.

“After the first album I didn’t know if we would last a month, let alone a year,” he says now, from Arizona, with the wry ease of a man who has had sixty years to appreciate the joke.

The numbers

The Beach Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and in 2001 Jardine received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award alongside his bandmates. Between 1961 and the present, the band produced thirty-three studio albums. They had dozens of top 40 hits across multiple continents. Surfin’ USA, Fun Fun Fun, I Get Around, Help Me Rhonda – on which Al sang lead on the number one original – California Girls, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, God Only Knows, Good Vibrations. Jardine sang lead on number one hits Help Me Rhonda in 1965 and Cottonfields in 1970, as well as a string of beloved album tracks across the band’s creative peak.

The music did not just sell records. It rewired the emotional architecture of a generation – perhaps two generations. When Jardine talks about what happens when the first notes of California Girls hit a crowd, he is not talking about nostalgia in any diminished sense. He is talking about something closer to a physical response, a cellular memory.

“As soon as our fans hear the opening of California Girls, it is like opening a time capsule,” he says. “Music has such strong links to memories.”

He is right. On March 19, 1978, at the Sydney Sports Ground – a school night, as it happened, reached by bus from Wollongong — I stood in the rain with a friend Anthony Devlin and watched the Beach Boys play. The crowd was soaked to the core and singing every word. Forty-seven years later it remains the greatest concert I have ever seen. Whatever Al Jardine is describing when he talks about time capsules, that night is mine.

Brian Wilson — the friend he lost and the music he carries forward

The Australian tour was originally planned as a celebration of the Beach Boys catalogue. It became something more significant on June 11, 2025, when Brian Wilson – Jardine’s friend, classmate, football teammate and bandmate – died at the age of 82.

Jardine’s tribute, posted to his social media accounts in the hours after Wilson’s death, was one of the most quietly beautiful pieces of writing to come out of that week’s outpouring of grief. “Brian Wilson, my friend, my classmate, my football teammate, my Beach Boy bandmate and my brother in spirit, I will always feel blessed that you were in our lives for as long as you were,” he wrote. “You were a humble giant who always made me laugh and we will celebrate your music forever. Brian, I’ll really miss you. Still, I have the warmth of the sun.”

He added: “I think the most comforting thought right now is that you are reunited with Carl and Dennis, singing those beautiful harmonies again.”

Carl Wilson – the band’s lead guitarist and another of its finest vocalists – died in 1998. Dennis Wilson, the surfer, the original inspiration for the band’s imagery and arguably its wildest spirit, drowned in 1983. Of the five founding members, only Jardine, Mike Love and Bruce Johnston remain. The weight of that carries through the music now in a way it could not when they were young men from Hawthorne with a vision and a harmony structure unlike anything anyone had heard before.

“I’ve been gathering up the troops – Brian’s excellent band,” Jardine says of the Pet Sounds Band. “We’re all just dying to get back to work, and we’re going to have some fun.”

The band — and the sound

The Pet Sounds Band is an eleven-piece ensemble featuring music director Darian Sahanaja – who led Brian Wilson’s touring band for decades – plus most of the musicians who toured with Wilson on his landmark Pet Sounds 50th Anniversary Tour. These are people who spent years learning how to reproduce, live and in real time, the most intricate vocal and instrumental arrangements in the history of popular music. They are very good at it.

Jardine explains how the sound is achieved and the explanation is remarkable in its simplicity. The musical director isolated the voices on the original recordings. Every night, the band sings the songs note for note like the records.

“And we sound like the Beach Boys,” he says, without the slightest hint of boast. It is just a statement of fact from a man who was there when the records were made and is here now to make sure they are preserved and performed with the fidelity they deserve.

The setlist changes every night. “But we always do all the hits,” he adds. “Logic prevails.”

He has even expanded the famously brief Ding Dang – a 58-second curiosity from the 1977 album The Beach Boys Love You – with new verses. “I hope that doesn’t offend fans,” he says, “but it really is hilarious.”

Australia — and what it means

“Australia is a special place,” Jardine says. “I think I’ve managed to get there once a decade.” Six times, across a career that spans more than sixty years. He remembers Byron Bay Bluesfest. He remembers diving on the Great Barrier Reef. The 2016 tour with Brian Wilson at the Sydney Opera House – where they performed Pet Sounds in its entirety to mark its 50th anniversary – was, it turned out, Wilson’s final Australian tour.

The June 2026 tour now carries that additional dimension. Al Jardine and The Pet Sounds Band play the Sydney Opera House on June 23, Perth’s Regal Theatre on June 25, the Thebarton Theatre in Adelaide on June 27, Hamer Hall in Melbourne on June 28, QPAC Brisbane on June 30, and the Civic Theatre Newcastle on July 2.

He is 83 years old. He lives in a house by the water in Monterey, California – “my estate, if that’s what you call it.” He has an apartment in Scottsdale. He listens to SiriusXM and loves going back to music he hasn’t heard in years, rediscovering the old records the way his audiences rediscover them every night.

“My life is my working,” he said.

There is something in that – something about the particular gift of loving what you do so completely that stopping would be the stranger choice – that feels less like a statement about old age than a statement about what it means to have found your thing. Most people spend their lives looking for it. Al Jardine found it at Hawthorne High School, on a football field, standing next to a quiet kid called Brian Wilson.

He has been living inside that finding ever since.

Al Jardine and The Pet Sounds Band tour Australia June 23 to July 2, 2026. Tickets here