"They said, ‘Thank you, but no thank you - it’s not a Monkees song.’ He said, ‘Wait a minute, I am one of the Monkees! What are you talking about?’": Micky Dolenz explains Mike Nesmith's "frustration" at being in The Monkees

The Monkees.

The last surviving Monkee, Micky Dolenz, turned 80 earlier this month, and with an upcoming solo US tour coming up, has been talking about his life in the group, commonly regarded as the first ‘manufactured’ band.

But not a boyband, it seems. “It was not a boyband,” he insisted in an interview with Alexis Petridis of the Guardian. “It was the cast of a television show, like when the cast of Glee made albums.”