The Clientele are well into their U.S. tour in support of their new CD, God Save the Clientele, and despite playing night-after-night to uproarious fanfare, the journey isn’t without its heartbreaks. “I didn’t get to meet 50 Cent,” complains frontman Alasdair Maclean, via cell phone while en route to San Francisco. The band and the rapper were both scheduled to tape a performance for the same Yahoo Music program in Santa Monica.

With his starched British accent, Maclean sounds more suited to lecturing on the intricacies of surrealist literature clad in patches of suede instead of spending a Saturday afternoon crammed in a tour van and lamenting a lost opportunity to get matching grills with Fiddy.

“I wanted to call him ‘50 Pence,’or maybe ‘25 Pence,’ assuming we could even get within 6 feet of him.”

Of course, a Clientele and 50 Cent pairing wouldn’t be the first unexpected blip on the cultural radar. The band has already been sampled on a track for a hip-hop band so obscure that Maclean can’t even recall the name when pressed. “It’s certainly no one very well known, probably just a myspace hip-hop group. But it’s an art that’s very alien to the one that we make, and it’s great that we can just pop up in it; it’s fantastic.”

Perhaps the band’s most curious incarnation involves their role in The Story of Lee, a comic strip written by Sean Michael Wilson, a Scottish writer currently living in Japan. “If I had one wish, it would be that we were as good looking as they made us in the comic,” laments Maclean. “They gave us a fifth member who is a very sleazy one and who is constantly trying to pick up girls, which is something nobody in the band really does at all.”

However, anyone who has listened to Maclean sensuously coo, “C’mon darling, let’s be lovers” in the chorus to the God Save The Clientele track, “Bookshop Casanova,” might assume him to be a fairly adept letch. “This one certainly is sunnier. It’s a record all about fun,” Maclean says of the new album. With its ’60s pop sensibility, it plays like a 14-song love letter to The Monkees.

Maclean was introduced to the Monkees the same way many a second-generation fan on this side of the pond was, via reruns of the TV show in syndication. “There’s no ’60s flavor to anything that happened in the ’80s, but the Monkees were shown every day during summer break. It was the reruns shown during school holiday that kept the torch of ’60s music burning in me for a few years.”

There’s a certain irony to a meticulous songwriter idolizing a pre-fabricated band who didn’t write their own songs and didn’t even play their own instruments on most of their records. But that doesn’t seem to bother Maclean. “It doesn’t matter who wrote or played on the record, it just matters how the record sounds and The Monkees records sound fantastic.”

June 8, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8, $15.