Davy Jones

The Manchester-born Monkee reflects on Britain and America in the aftermath of the shooting of Robert Kennedy.

Britain's sole representative in the Monkees was at a junction in his career when this interview was filmed. But the bulk of the interview is taken up by the still fresh news of the shooting of Robert Kennedy. A visibly shaken Jones offers some tentative thoughts on the cultural differences that make assassinations so rare in the UK but so common in the US (Dr Martin Luther King's assassination came just two months earlier, in a decade that had already seen the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Malcolm X).

By June 1968, The Monkees TV show had been cancelled, and while a feature film spin-off, Head, directed by Bob Rafaelson, was in the can, it would bomb at the box office on its release that November. Only one of the four planned TV specials that Jones mentions in the interview ever appeared. The Monkees as a band would soon begin to splinter, with Peter Tork's departure in December 1968 followed by Mike Nesmith's some 18 months later. During the 1970s, Jones would develop parallel careers in music, acting and clothing retail.