I can hear a familiar guitar arpeggio ringing in my head as the Last Train to Clarksville leaves the station. Michael Nesmith has died, aged 78, and with him goes a little piece of pop history, and another piece of the childhood of pop and TV kids who grew up in the Sixties... and beyond.

I loved Mike Nesmith, and you maybe did too if you came of pop age in the 1960s. He was the woolly hatted, Gretsch guitar playing, deadpan leader of the Monkees, the ultimate manufactured band. Created for an American TV sitcom as a US response to the Beatles and the British Invasion, The Monkees were a fictional pop phenomenon who became a real pop phenomenon.

The Telegraph London