You have to love The Beach Boys. When it comes to listening to an old barbershop quartet squabbling with each other until two of them die, one of them goes mad and another becomes even more of an idiot than he already was, The Beach Boys can't be beaten.

And now The Beach Boys are back together! Sort of! Obviously the two dead Beach Boys didn't get back together with the rest of them, and they didn't perform any songs, and they probably wouldn't have got back together if people hadn't started liking Brian Wilson again, but Beach Boys Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine all stood on top of a building and got given a plaque each. With is sort of something, we suppose.

It's actually illegal to hate The Beach Boys. In the 60s, The Beach Boys topped The Beatles for invention and harmonies, The Rolling Stones for tunes and Pink Floyd for drug-induced mental breakdowns. Plus they soundtracked more films about Tom Cruise shaking up some booze on a beach than anyone else, too. The Beach Boys are brilliant, and there's probably medical evidence to support that somewhere.

It's 40 years since Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys was released, and there was a mini Beach Boys reunion on top of the Capitol Records building in Hollywood yesterday to celebrate. Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine, along with later members Bruce Johnston and David Marks all joined up to mark the occasion, and be given plaques for their 2003 compilation Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys going double platinum.

It's the first time that the three surviving original members of The Beach Boys have been seen together in public for a decade, although they have been keeping in contact – mainly by suing each other all the time. In November, Mike Love – a man so objectionably boorish he named a solo album Mike Love Not War – sued empty husk of a creative genius Brian Wilson over the 2004 release of the 'so it was a lost album because it isn't very good' Smile album, claiming Wilson:

"shamelessly misappropriated (Love's) songs, likeness and the Beach Boys trademark, as well as the `Smile' album itself."

But all of that was forgotten about yesterday, as Wilson, Love and Jardine all got back together to joke and slap each other's backs a lot. When asked if all the previous hatchets have been buried, Love pointed to his back and told reporters:

"The hatchets are right here… there's issues that arise, and you resolve them over time. We've been together, just in different configurations and different situations. But this is a great one because everybody's in a celebratory mood, everybody's on their good behaviour and everybody's enjoying the fact that our records have been recognised even 40 years after we first put (them) out."

Needless to say, Mike Love will probably sue Brian Wilson for having very slightly more platinum his plaque before the week is out, but hey, a photo opportunity is a photo opportunity.

Read more:

Original Beach Boys Members Reunite – ABC

[story by Stuart Heritage]