Hey hey - we're the Spice Girls' grandads They were the first manufactured band - and they're back. Charles Laurence talks to the Monkees THE unmistakable sound of a pop band in full swing is leaking from the sound stage of a low white building in Burbank, California. The Monkees, the notorious "prefab Four" of the 1960s and the world's first manufactured pop band, are together again and rehearsing for their comeback tour. Inside is a scene to raise a chuckle among all those rock critics who carped that the Monkees, put together by a television network for a children's show, couldn't play their own instruments and lip-synched to somebody else's music. The drums bang, the keyboards hum, the guitars strum. But two of the Monkees, Mickey Dolenz, the "zany" one with the big, wide face, and Peter Tork, the "goofy" blond with the floppy hair, are sitting on a leather sofa sipping drinks. Only one Monkee, Michael Nesmith- the quiet one who used to wear a knitted ski-cap - is playing his guitar and singing into a microphone. The rest are . . . back-up musicians. So what's new, boys? Dolenz jumps up and offers a handshake of welcome to the happy, bubbly world of the Monkees, his smile as broad as ever but these days setting off a cascade of wrinkles. Nesmith is working on a song he has written himself, he explains, and will be performing it on tour with the back-up men. Back in the Sixties, when the band sold millions of copies of songs such as I'm a Believer and Last Train to Clarksville, their instruments were merely actors' props. But when their television show ended and the Monkees decided to seize "artistic control" and play their own songs, they flopped. They have been in the rock-and-roll wilderness for 27 years. They are coming back together, they say, for fun and money. But the old accusations of prefab music still clearly sting. Their new album is pointedly called Justus ("just us"), with a guarantee that every song is written and performed by Monkees. Even now, this seems unnecessarily risky; the real legacy of the Monkees is simply that they were the first manufactured band: they are the grandfathers of the Spice Girls and all those bands who have been assembled by managers and studios to score bull's-eyes on marketing targets. Peter Tork, who ended up with a failed blues band living in a northern California hippy colony after the fall, sees grand implications and existential meaning in the return of the original casting-call band. He talks about the "meta-artistic look" they are taking at themselves, and of how it is "consistent with the current trends in art deconstruction and post modernism". With their television special, their album and tour, they are, he says earnestly, "asking all the existential questions: are we? aren't we?" Phew: Meta-artistic, deconstructed, post-modern, existential Monkees. "I do mean it. Every word of it," says Tork. "And I don't mind if it does sound absurd." Well, the Monkees were always meant to be "zany" in a 1960s sort of way, and Tork's soliloquy is certainly true to that. The other Monkees seem unconvinced. Even now, all in their fifties and grizzled to boot, they generate a sort of hyper-conversation with ideas and subject matter bouncing from one to the other and each man still dedicated to giving his own twist, just like in the old television show. "What you have to remember," says Dolenz, returning the conversation to earth, "is that we were all just hired hands. We were hired to be actors acting a pop group; we weren't a pop group, or at least not at first." We should, he adds, think of this as more of a one-off revival of a Broadway musical like Showboat. Davy Jones, the original Monkees front man and designated British heart-throb, goes along with Dolenz. This may be because, of the four who won the job from 440 hopefuls at a fabled casting call from NBC television in 1965, Dolenz and Jones had already developed a degree of showbusiness pragmatism as established child actors. "The comeback's no big deal," says Jones, who is also a trained jockey. "It's just wonderful to be making money, and have fun. Ah . . . money, pleasure, the orgasmic rush of being a heart-throb again!" He has, he points out, homes to maintain in England and Los Angeles, a second divorce to pay for, and horses to feed. On the subject of money, Nesmith has only one brief comment to make: "I've never had any problems with it." This is in large part because his mother, a secretary, had a flash of genius and invented Liquid Paper "whiteout". She sold the formula for $20 million; Nesmith has commuted to LA today from New Mexico in his private jet. "He spends all his time counting his money," says Tork, who is broke. Nesmith scowls. His comments on other subjects also prove brief. "Comeback? I have absolutely no intention of making a comeback," he says, deadpan. "We've had the Sixties. Been there, done that." He has a grey beard and short-cropped grey hair under a Harley-Davidson motorcycle hat. There have been various Monkees reunions before - '75, and '86 with three of them, and more cabaret and amusement park turns with just Jones and Tork - but this is the first time that Nesmith has agreed to return. It is making all the difference. They are getting attention and there is an air of excitement. His remarks, however, have somewhat flattened the atmosphere. Tork has the job of keeping the ball bouncing. "Hey, me, I'm still ambitious," he says. "I want to be a pop star. Maybe I'm old enough now." Age: he has hit on a subject they can all agree on. They have all, as Jones puts it, "been down the road a bit". He counts up, and concludes that the Monkees can account for 13 wives and 20 children, who vary in age from 28 to eight. Dolenz tells a story of how shocked he was when he picked up the British 'teen magazine Bliss for his 15-year-old daughter Charlotte, and found the Position of the Month feature,complete with where-to-put-what illustrations. "What," he asks, "is going on over there?" Tork says he knows what Dolenz means. "When I was 17, I saw no reason why a girl shouldn't be sexually active at 16, preferably with me," he says. "And when my daughter was 16 . . . no way!" It is all too easy to forget that the Monkees, while never precisely sex symbols, were once huge. Their soap ran for 52 episodes and 16 million albums were sold. They might have been miming to soundtracks laid by other musicians - they played, believe it or not, with Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Stephen Stills and Glen Campbell, among others - but when they appeared at Wembley Stadium, they were the first to launch the concept of the "stadium band". The memories are not made easier by the fact that for all their efforts to grow into their super-status as a pop group - Dolenz learnt to play drums, Jones a bit of guitar, while the other two polished-up their existing skills - their run in the charts ended so abruptly. Tork eventually became a teacher. Nesmith bought himself out of his contract, became a country-and-western singer, movie and pop- video maker. Dolenz went to London, invested well in property and produced pop films and children's shows for the BBC. Jones went back to musicals, among other things. Last year, he was on the road with Grease. Tork and Nesmith, in particular, are keen to revise a little history. They hate the idea of being remembered as a gang of innocent teenage patsies. They smoked dope and chased girls like the best of them, and they want us to know it. "We were," says Nesmith, not entirely convincingly, "part of the counter-culture." But the new album, surely, is offered as some sort of vindication? "Hey," says Tork "it was just that we thought we're all still alive, still getting along, and why not try it out?" And for once, Nesmith was free from "other commitments", and said he'd come along. The next plan is for a full-length Monkees movie, deconstructionist of course. Ticket sales for the tour are going well, and the television special in America was watched by 16 million people, more than in their heyday. "We have nothing to vindicate," says Nesmith tersely. "You either get it, or you don't." The Monkees's tour of nine UK cities begins at Newcastle Arena on March 7 and ends at Wembley Arena on March 20.