The Monkees’ TV show was one of the first things I ever saw when my family moved briefly back to England from Germany in 1967.

That made them one of the first groups I’d ever really got to know after growing up with nothing but British Forces radio (BFBS) and no telly. And may explain why they meant more to me than The Beatles.

I was too young, and too new to pop culture, to grasp the prevailing view that they were a manufactured knock-off of the Fab Four, that the show was a pastiche of A Hard Day’s Night (which I had never seen, and still haven’t) and the “characters” created for the foursome were modelled on those of The Beatles.

I didn’t even know that they weren’t a real band (until they were) and I doubt I would have cared, though I was lucky enough to go and see them at Wembley Arena on their 1997 reunion tour. 

I just loved the slapstick comedy of the TV show: a sit-com about four pals – Micky and Peter, and their English mate Davy – monkeying around in LA while trying to make their names as a pop group.

Most of all I loved the catchy songs they played, and I could not have cared less that they didn’t write them themselves; I probably didn’t know some bands did compose their own songs.

This song is a bit of an exception though, because it was actually written by Mike Nesmith – the “smart and serious” one in the woolly hat – and first recorded in 1966 by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (below) in an attempt to give them a hit single.

In the end their label, Elektra – riding high with West Coast bands Love and The Doors – decided not to release it as a single after all, though it appeared on their album East-West that August.

A month earlier The Monkees themselves recorded it, with Mickey Dolenz (“the funny one”) singing the lead, Nesmith playing guitar, Peter Tork on bass, boosted by legendary session musicians The Wrecking Crew, including Glen Campbell and James Burton on guitar.

It appeared on their second album More Of The Monkees in 1967 but was not released as a single, though it was later given away as a cereal-box prize and was covered again two decades later by hip-hop outfit Run-DMC.