The first manufactured pop act, The Monkees, are in town this weekend.Although the original TV show ran only for a couple of years, their enduring popularity amazes even ex-Monkee Mickey Dolenz, writes Tony Clayton-Lea

'Madness!! Auditions for acting roles in new TV series - running parts for four insane boys, age 17-21." So went the advertisement placed in Hollywood's daily Variety in August 1965. Hundreds of hopeful youngsters turned up and were whittled down to four - a quartet who had little or no previous knowledge of each other and no apparent affinity other than that they might make some money and become famous for a time. The four were Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz, two former child actors of moderate ability, and Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith, two musicians of moderate achievements.

The Monkees are recognised as being the world's first bona fide manufactured pop act. Put together by middle-aged businessmen who foisted their idea of a pop group upon the world, success was handed to The Monkees on a silver platter, causing them decades of envy and disdain. For a while, the pre-fab four, as they were known, shattered album sales records held by Elvis Presley and The Beatles, won Emmy Awards, were hailed by the likes of John Lennon and Frank Zappa, and socialised with the likes of Jack Nicholson, Jimi Hendrix and Paul Mazursky.

Yikes - even Charles Manson hovered in the background.

Cruising in his jeep through the Santa Monica Mountains into Beverly Hills, talking on a hands-free mobile phone, Micky Dolenz is no longer surprised by the fact that The Monkees as a unit are still around (although their current world tour is just him and Davy Jones with seasoned backing musicians), yet very much surprised there are people who still want to hear the music. He left the band when they finally split up in the early 1970s, unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of The Fonz in Happy Days and started working in television production in the UK and US, a career move he describes as uncontrived.

"I don't think any of us had any realisation of the impact the band originally had," he says. "The whole thing only lasted a couple of years, and we all went our separate ways, but the records and the shows kept our profile percolating; and gradually we became a permanent fixture on the cultural landscape of America and beyond. Everywhere I go there's some reference." The show's producers were Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the former a bohemian drifter, the latter a conservative company man who quickly embraced the hippy ideologies of free love, reefers and lack of responsibility; together they went on to make several era-defining movies with Jack Nicholson. They wanted to make a television show along the lines of Richard Lester's Beatles movie, A Hard Day's Night. They were smart enough not to make the comic elements in The Monkees shows topical or satirical - which, like the contemporaneous Rowan & Martin's Laugh In, would have dated badly. Meanwhile, the show's music publishers, Screen Gems, were shrewd enough not to allow the members of the manufactured band to write songs or to play instruments - at least until they had some form or track record.

Dolenz agrees that the show was put together in a way that shattered US television's ideas of how to portray teenagers. In Hollywood's ivory towers, teenagers were juvenile delinquents or troublesome children, minority interests ignored like so many others. The backers of the show wanted non-professionals who could act themselves. They also wanted four unknowns who would not demand a large wage and who were initially too overawed to do anything other than go with the flow.

"Have you seen Galaxy Quest, the movie about fictitious sci-fi characters visited by real aliens to save their planet?" Dolenz asks. "That's what happened to The Monkees! It started out with fictitious people and all of a sudden we were made into a real pop band. And we weren't just actors playing the fool. We were cast in the same way as you would a West End musical - you had to sing, dance, move, act, improvise and play an instrument. The closest thing I could describe it as is a stage musical on television." While the group's early songs have long since proved their worth as classic examples of bubblegum pop (Last Train To Clarksville, I'm A Believer, I'm Not Your Stepping Stone, Pleasant Valley Sunday, Daydream Believer), later self-written material highlighted Dolenz and particularly Michael Nesmith as sorely underrated tunesmiths. Nesmith's holy trinity of influences, Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmie Rodgers, generated superb album track country/pop songs (including The Girl I Knew Somewhere, You Just May Be The One), but it was Dolenz's Alternate Title (aka "Randy Scouse Git", inspired by Till Death Us Do Part's Tony Booth, father of Cherie Blair) that gave The Monkees one of their biggest hits. It also validated them in the eyes of the people who had initially refused requests from them to write their own material.

"That was a huge feather in my cap," admits Dolenz. "I suppose it did validate us, but by the time that single came out, various people had been fired, so it didn't really matter. If we'd had the opportunity for the show to have continued broadcasting for a couple of more years and had more of our material distributed on the back of a successful television show, then it would have been a different story." So Dolenz has been blessed with The Monkees, yet he says he has never been cursed by the association. "The way I look at it is you start a train rolling by virtue of your own hard work. You get lucky - a television show, a bunch of hit records - and then the train leaves without you. You have a choice of either staying on the train, riding it wherever it goes, or you can try and change the course of the train and reinvent yourself. Or you can just get off the train, which is what I did.

"Fortunately, I had other strings to my bow, even though a lot of people were thinking of me in terms of The Monkees. Yet I realised soon enough that The Monkees just wouldn't stop.

"Some people in similar situations spoil it for everyone when they try to blank out their past - they don't talk about it in interviews, they don't sing songs the public want to hear or they refuse to discuss anything about it. I never went through that stage."

WHEN he's not engaged in Monkees-type activities, Dolenz keeps busy by writing children's books, occasional semi-autobiographic works and selling paintings to galleries around the West Coast of the US.

"I get up to all kinds of things," he says, "but not the kind of stuff you would know about unless you read the Hollywood Reporter."

He is, he imparts cheerfully, not short of money, lest one thinks The Monkees nostalgia circuit is his sole method of earning.

"These days, I can honestly say I only do things I enjoy," he says. "Thankfully, they also make a lot of money. I can pick and choose, I get offers all the time, and some of it is crap. For instance, you will very seldom see me on an episode of Wings or Sabrina - The Teenage Witch playing myself. I hate doing it. It pays good money, but I feel like I'm a dancing bear, famous only for being famous.

"I love going on tour more and more, though. Everyone is much more mellow."

Dolenz has almost reached his office in Beverly Hills by now, and politely asks if we're finished. I throw out a final question: if you were about to audition for a pop band today, knowing what you know, what wouldn't you do?

"I can't think of what I wouldn't do," he replies, "but I can tell you what I certainly would do, and that's to make sure I hired a good lawyer."

• The Monkees play Dublin's Vicar Street on Saturday