HEY, hey, what the hell. Some secrets get too hot to handle. Maybe it's bye-bye to many and colleagues I value highly but it's true: I was a Monkees fan in the 1960s.

Set to roll into Dublin to play at the Point on March 10th, it's all part of a nine-venue tour of Britain and Ireland that will culminate in the 12,000-seat Wembley Arena a few days later.

The last time I thought about these guys I was a 14-year-old with poor skin - can't bear to say acne - and black-rimmed, Dame-Edna-style glasses, recently transplanted from an all-girl Irish secondary school to a New England high school every bit as zappy as Degrassi High. While half the world my age was turning on, tuning in and dropping out, I was sitting in front of the TV set cravenly singing along to "I'm a Believer".

They were the original put-together band, formed as a result of a 1965 ad in Daily Variety in LA for a TV pilot sitcom with "running parts for four insane boys aged 17 to 21". Charles Manson, better known later as a serial killer, was one of more than 400 who applied, as was Stephen Stills who with Crosby and Nash were to become my real heroes when I pulled myself together and grew up.

The Monkees hadn't met in high school; hadn't spent hours together jamming in someone's garage to the annoyance of their parents; hadn't driven through the night in beat-up old vans to downbeat venues to play their early gigs. They weren't fused forever by having gone through those classic tribal rituals together; the first thing Micky Dolenz had to do when he was hired to play the show's singing drummer was learn to play the drums. Still, they went on to notch up four consecutive number one albums and the show, which ran for more than 50 episodes, won an Emmy.

Even back then I knew suggestions that they were America's answer to the Beatles were wrong, even had a slightly immoral ring - but suggestions that they were the Boyzone of their day seem out of line. Only in their genesis is there a similarity.

The Monkees phenomenon was apparently dreamed up by TV executives to provide clean, all-American TV and lyrics for a generation that had suddenly begun to wear its hair long, run around in open-toe sandals and refuse to go to war - and started smoking some weedy kind of thing that could lead to worse. Understandably, parents loved the Monkees.

Within five minutes of arriving in the US for that first time, I'd bought Barry McGuire's album Eve of Destruction, got hold of a black maxi coat and was driving my mother crazy talking about heading out to Haight-Ashbury. Still it was hard not to sing along when the Monkees came on screen singing Last Train to Clarksville.

Micky Dolenz was definitely the sexy one. Davy Jones was the one all the American girls wanted but even then, were we to have come face to face, I knew I'd be taller than him (he'd been a jockey in another life). Coming from Ireland, he being a Mancunian didn't have for me the cachet it seemed to have for all those blonde Connecticut girls I was in school with: they were in awe of him, I was in awe of them.

Mike Nesmith might have been more attractive if he'd taken off that woolly hat; anyway he was always the serious one, the one who after three-and-a-half years paid $160,000 to buy his way out and go back to folk music. Though the other three have done things together in the intervening period, the key to this full regrouping is a deal whereby this time they wrote and recorded their own stuff for Justus, the new album to be released on this side of the Atlantic next week.

In charge of their own show at last ... it's comforting to read about it. I mean if they had to wait until their 50s to do something like this "completely on their own terms", there's lots of hope and scope for the rest of us.

I can't say I'd go as far as their fan club president, Kirk White, who calls the reunion a great event. Can't say I've been actively missing these boys/ men over the last 30 years and certainly can't answer any questions in the 40 Monkees Trivia questionnaire. Sample question: "In what popular Broadway musical did Davy have the lead role?" (Answer, so you won't die wondering: Oliver!) Still notwithstanding the labels now being thrown in their direction (such as "fossil" and "artifact") it's hard not to remember what it was like being a Daydream Believer.

Then there's the survivor syndrome. The sheer admiration for the fact that they've come through life's trials and tribulations. Davy Jones jokes that the money made from the reunion will come in handy for alimony. Peter Tork talks about the bumps on the road but, hell, they're still prepared to get up on stage and shake a leg.

TO me it's all tied up with that time of high adolescence as a sophomore at E.O. Smith High School where, within hours of being parachuted into its gleaming corridors thronged with confident teenagers, I'd made a friend in Chris Thorkelson: lots of hair, steel-rimmed glasses - and the kid brother of Peter Tork. And so I lived my own personal version of "I've danced with a man who's danced with a girl who's danced with the Prince of Wales".

At the outset ft has to be said that in spite of visits to the Thorkelson home I never met the mop-haired Pete which I was sorry about then and, reading about him now, am sorry about still. He sounds interesting: those years he put in prior to the Monkees, hanging around Greenwich Village, playing in a folk group with Stephen Stills, and all those things he has to say now about the difference between the grunge and alternative music of today and the folk songs of 30 years ago - one being that they had room to believe in love today "it's all angst".

I've seen Chris twice since 1968. Once shortly afterwards when he arrived at my home in Ireland with a carpet bag one Christmas morning, stayed a few days and painted a picture. I still have. The second time was a few years later when, with my first pay cheques from The Irish Times, I did what I had wanted to do all along and got a plane back to the US - only to discover that whatever about not being able to go home again, it isn't always the same when you try to revisit the landmarks of a golden youth.

Most of the kids and families I'd known had gone, moved on, in that uprooted way that can be part of America. But Chris was there and we walked the old sleepers of the abandoned railway line and talked about David and Sue and Janet - and Jeanie with the nut-brown hair from New Haven.

So things come round - sometimes - and now it's time for a Monkees revival; a revival with a vengeance. There's the coffee table book, the career retrospective CD-Rom and a full-length TV documentary. And Rhino, the company behind much of it, has released limited edition box sets of 21 videocassettes containing all 58 episodes of the TV show. There's even talk of a Spielberg movie with the director using Supergrass to play the boys when young.

Who'll go to the Point is hard to say. Today's 12-year-olds, ageing Monkees fans or 1960s groupies who want to hear some classics from their halcyon era and don't mind who sings them?

The Eagles did it, so did the Everly Brothers. The promise in the advance material is that, free of those who sought to control them 30 years ago, what'll be heard on stage now is the music of a band that has "at, last, won creative control of their destinies". After all the music industry manipulators, the outside song writers and the session men, this time they're getting up on that stage pretty much on their own. Good luck to them.