Singer-songwriter, country rocker, music video pioneer, album and film producer, intellectual gadfly...and one of madcap cult TV quartet The Monkees. Hey, hey it's Mike Nesmith, writes Derek O'Connor

A genuine cult hero is hard to come by these days. All the good ones (and, come to think of it, most of the dodgy ones) have been rediscovered, reissued, reclaimed and fawned over ad infinitum. Michael Nesmith, however, is your quintessential cult hero - and then some. And it's time to spread the love.

The wild, woolly and somewhat wonderful career of this amiable Texan gentleman defies any conventional notion of anything resembling "definition". Sure, Nesmith's place in popular culture is secure, thanks to his tenure with the original (and greatest) manufactured boyband phenomenon, The Monkees. But over the past four decades the man has made his mark across every medium imaginable.

"I've only tried to do work that interested me," Nesmith says. "There were never any conscious efforts to be prescient. I'm just happy that a lot of the things I've been involved with have had this amazing afterlife. What's been most useful for me, in terms of innovation, is to only take from the past what I need, and let everything else fall away.

"I have no time for nostalgia. If I go back to something, I only deal with it in the present tense; I put it to work for me in the now. I never feel inclined to do the same thing again. Quite the opposite, actually."

Let's review a life in perpetual progress; Mike Nesmith was a noted singer-songwriter on the LA coffeehouse scene when he auditioned for The Monkees. After a few years at the top (in 1967, they outsold The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined) the band decided they wanted to write their own songs and play on their records, transmogrifying into an unlikely garage band and sticking it to the man with the surreal movie Head.

Here's where it gets really interesting. Nesmith moved to Nashville and cut a series of beloved country-rock albums with his First and Second National Bands (his songs have been covered by everyone from Linda Ronstadt and The Lemonheads to Run DMC). An interest in the developing medium of music video saw him win the first video Grammy Award (for his seminal Elephant Parts) and develop the concept for what would eventually become MTV - Nesmith is officially recognised as its creator.

From there he dabbled in film production (masterminding Alex Cox's 1984 classic Repo Man) and literature (publishing a well-received novel, The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora). He participated in a short-lived reunion with his Monkees cohorts for a 1997 album, Justus, a TV movie and a handful of European dates, after which he swiftly bailed. He has also chaired the Council on Ideas, an international gathering of intellectuals brainstorming solutions to world problems. Oh, and his mother invented liquid paper.

That's the short version. Thus, asking Mike Nesmith questions about The Monkees feels a bit like quizzing Woody Allen on Take the Money and Run. He doesn't do nostalgia.

Between philanthropic endeavours and ongoing business concerns (he maintains a devoted following through his online boutique, Videoranch, a one-stop virtual shop for all things 'Nez'), Nesmith has found the time to complete a new record, his first in more than a decade. Rays is an ambitious, largely instrumental symphonic suite that fuses elements of calypso, swing, jazz and funk into a slice of beguiling ambient Americana that, at times, feels like a cosmic counterpart of sorts to Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks's Smile. It's quite unlike anything you'll hear any time soon.

"The more I look at it, the more I realise that this thing has the whole diorama of my history in music. I didn't have any intention of doing that - it just sort of crawled out of the wall."

Nez is a relentless musical explorer, and the road to Rays was paved with pitfalls aplenty as he figured his way around the new technologies. "I was experimenting with these new tools, making these snippets of songs and tunes and lyrics, but there didn't seem to be a cohesive whole to anything. At some point I thought it might become a motion picture, at another a live performance - it just didn't seem to have any direction. It got very depressing."

Finally, after several years of knocking ideas around various creative cul-de-sacs, what he likes to refer to as a "Copernican Shift" in his creative process occurred.

"I began to see an emerging pattern to the whole thing. I had all these strange snippets and I laid them in an order that I had never put them in before, let one play after another, and I began to see the pattern that was there, how all the different pieces would fit together, what their relationship was to each other . . . Suddenly, I had a record."

After decades spent trying to reimagine creative media and methods of distribution, Nesmith now finds himself an elder statesman of sorts. Rays is his first album released in the digital downloading era. As custodian of his own back catalogue - we can't recommend highly enough his 1970 solo debut, Loose Salute - he's been ahead of the game on that front for decades. Go to Videoranch and you can create your own, custom-made, Nez favourites CD. The man continues to explore the technological possibilities.

"We really have to figure out what a record is now," he says. "We used to think of them as hard goods, be it on vinyl or CD. That's no longer the case. Records exist primarily as a digital file, and they're pretty much entirely independent of whatever hardware carries it. In addition to that, the notion of how long a song has to be, how long an album has to last - it's all being rethought, not just the release pattern of the record but the entire creative process. It's an exciting time."

At an age where most of his peers have settled into comfy irrelevance, this sixty-something counterculture icon continues to stride boldly forward; among numerous projects, he's developing video game ideas, put another novel in the pipeline, and is exploring the notion of Rays as a "unique" live experience. We've seen the future, people, and it's Nez-shaped.

"I've seen a lot of the notions that I had in the '70s and '80s come to fruition," he says. "My move into business was always driven by the need to get my own creative endeavours out there, and I think that was a mistake. I was always looking for a way to create a distribution system that I could use myself, and the guys who were really successful at it were the ones who concentrated on the distribution itself - approaching it from a creative standpoint was not a smart thing to do.

"Now I don't have to piggyback on anything; my record can be made directly available for download, it's all under my control, it all goes out exactly the way I want it to. That's perfect for me."

For more information on all things Michael Nesmith and Rays see www.videoranch.com or www.nezrays.com