99. The Monkees
Hammersmith Apollo
4 September 2015
Saturday morning television, back when there were only four channels and one of them was Ceefax, was a riotous mash-up of dubbed chaos, animated nonsense and lightly regulated psychedelia. This was the golden age of cultural whiplash, where The Flashing Blade, a French swashbuckling serial redubbed by people who had barely read the script, bled seamlessly into The Banana Splits, a show that looked and sounded like it was written by a room full of toddlers on sherbet and LSD, and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, essentially eBay with Keith Chegwin. Somewhere in the middle of this joyful bedlam, lodged like a particularly catchy splinter, were The Monkees.
Let’s be clear, The Monkees weren’t real. Not to us, anyway. They were TV people. Characters in a show that was equal parts sitcom, music video and mildly startling vaudeville. They were assembled in a casting call, designed to be a product, and yet somehow, they transcended that. The format was chaotic, each episode a zany caper with the thinnest of plotlines wrapped around a song that, more often than not, ended up cracking the top ten. One week they’d be accidentally entering a haunted house soundtracked to the “Last Train to Clarksville”; the next they were being conned by shady music biz types to the sound of “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone.”. It was all transitioned between live action and a band performance with the subtlety and finesse of a Sherman tank with a broken clutch.
The scripts were deranged, the acting broadly slapstick, and the outfits a war crime against fashion. But the songs… oh, the songs. That’s what got you. Bubblegum on the outside but crafted by some of the best songwriters in the business: Carole King, Neil Diamond, Boyce and Hart, all delivered with a sincerity that stole past your cynicism. What started as a manufactured and processed product turned into something real, and for a generation raised on this chaos, those tunes stuck like musical duct tape to the soul.
So, decades later, when I heard that Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork were bringing The Monkees, or what was left of them, back for a final spin around the nostalgia circuit, I pounced on tickets. My mum had loved them, my dad had tolerated them. I had absorbed them via this TV osmosis and my wife, whose musical taste rarely intersects with mine unless ABBA are involved, was actually up for it. Which made this gig a unicorn: something we could both genuinely look forward to.
They took the stage with no fuss, no pomp. Just two aging rock ’n rollers with an easy chemistry and a few thousand fans willing them on. Film clips played behind them; vintage footage of the old show, grainy Technicolor snippets that now looked like dispatches from a happier, weirder planet. And then the music started. “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” “Daydream Believer.” “I’m a Believer.” Every song landed like a warm memory hitting a soft spot you forgot you had.
Between numbers, Micky and Peter traded gags with the comic timing of two mates at the pub. Dolenz told the tale of how he wrote “Randy Scouse Git” after a party with The Beatles, and how the label changed the title for the UK because someone at the BBC correctly guessed it might not go down well with the Sunday service crowd.
There was also a moving moment of tribute to Davy Jones, the teen heartthrob turned man-in-the-mirror, who’d passed a few years earlier. His voice still echoed in the film reels; his presence still lingered in the harmonies. Michael Nesmith, the most musically serious of the group, was still keeping his distance, having long carved out his own path in country rock and intellectual cool. But even in his absence, you could feel the full weight of what the four of them had meant to people.
And that’s what stayed with me. Yes, it was a nostalgia trip. Yes, the harmonies were thinner, the jokes more “dad” than “dynamite”. But there was love there, and joy, and something deeply authentic under all the cheese.
Peter Tork would die just three years after that show. Nesmith followed two years later. This wasn’t just a farewell tour. It was a farewell. And I was lucky enough to be in the room when those two glorious TV ghosts stepped out of the screen one last time and reminded us that something fake can, with enough heart, become something incredible.