Quite fitting really that this should be released just as the difficult to dislike Hear'Say are brightening up the charts with their first dab of pop sherbet that is 'Pure And Simple'. After all it could be said that The Monkees were where this clean-teethed,
eat-your-greens-and-wave-at-the-camera template was first laid down and it has rarely if EVER been bettered.
Boo you say! Boo and Hiss and indeed Boo again! How can a band be anything but sh*te when they don't write their own songs??When they wouldn't know one end of a drumstick from another never mind play on their own records?? The Beatles may have hated The Monkees and all they stood for but let me tell you this children: The Beatles were responsible for some pretty heinous stuff in their time but their most lasting contribution to the misery that is the music journo's lot is the now universally received truth that all proper bands MUST write their own stuff. IT'S MORE REAL MANOh grow up will ya......The London toilet circuit is clogged full of drab, little po-faced bands playing their own plinkety-plonk will-this-do-drivel and it's all because of those four scouse longhairs getting ideas above their station! Aaaaghhh
So god bless The Monkees then for being plastic fantastic and pissing everybody off. They didn't write or play?? So show me one song that Elvis or Sinatra ever broke sweat over... The trick is in surrounding yourself with the best songwriters that illicit drugs can buy -recording such classics as 'Last Train To Clarksville', 'Pleasant Valley Sunday' and 'Daydream Believer'- and then just sitting back to count the groupies.
Containing as it does a massive 70 tracks there's everything here that even the most worryingly obsessive Monkees fan could ever need. The frothiest, freakiest pop tunes in fact that the Sixties ever went wild to with 'Randy Scouse Git' and 'The Porpoise Song' in particular being far better than anything Lennon and McCartney ever managed to squabble up together. Go tell Noel. He might not believe you but Christ, he's been wrong before...
