Mirrors on the ceiling, pink champagne on ice- the Hotel California that the Eagles conjured up in the Seventies was a place of hubris and lush excess; of Tiffany and Mercedes - 'such a lovely place', as they sang with a languour only marginally tempered with irony. 'This could be heaven, or this could be hell.'

But that was then, and this is now.

It is a fine, early summer evening in Los Angeles. The freeways are clogged; the setting sun igniting the glass obelisks of Century City a fiery orange, and in a rehearsal studio, the Eagles have been preparing for a European tour - their first in 20 years.

Don Henley, the group's drummer, singer and principal songwriter, long ago checked out of the Hotel California. To be here he has flown in from Texas - the state where he was born and where he now lives with his wife of one year, Sharon, and their six-month-old child.

After years, as he puts it, of 'wading through all those actresses and girl singers^’, Henley says he finally got lucky.

Sharon, he says, used to be a model. 'But not in the sense you think of models. She lived in Paris for a while; she studied art history. She's basically just a good, warm hearted, sensitive Texas girl who was brought up in a really good family.

'We had a great wedding,' says Henley, warming at the memory. 'All my friends came and played --Springsteen, Sting, Billy Joel, John Fogerty, Jackson Browne, Sheryl Crow, Tony Bennett. It was quite a show.^"

After more than 20 years of Los Angeles, Henley likes living back in Texas. 'You hear people say "Excuse me" and "please" and "thank you" and "Yes, ma'am" and no, ma^'am", which is the way I was brought up,' he says. 'When my wife and I moved into our house the neighbours brought over cookies and brownies and said, "If you ever need us come and knock on the door." In Los Angeles you don't even know your fucking neighbours. As I get older I appreciate those things more.'

Henley is 48, a sober, quietly spoken man, dressed in a dowdy sweat-shirt and jeans. In the Seventies he was the Eagle who suffered from ulcers and he still has the air of a worrier about him.He settles back into his chair and swigs from a bottle of mineral water. Nowadays, he restricts his drinking to an occasional glass of red wine with meals, but with a tour in prospect he has forsaken even that - and smoking, too - to protect his voice. Like most musicians of his generation -those who are still alive - he stopped using drugs years ago.

Most men, he says, don't grow up until they get into their 40s. 'I think for women it’s probably around 30-31, but for men it takes much longer.' He could observe this in himself, trapped in destructive patterns of behaviour over relationships, 'things like that', which it took him years to break.

'But now, I feel better than I did in the Eighties, in every way. In fact, the band is probably in better shape than they were ten years ago. We sing better, we play better, we're all a little more focused. And we're all very grateful.

'We pride ourselves on the fact that we're one of the only bands of our generation left where all the members are still living.' For the first time in the conversation, Henley throws back his head and laughs. Actually, I really think that's an achievement.'

The rehearsal studio is cluttered with scores of guitars, dozens of amplifiers, a line of microphones, at which the Eagles have spent the day polishing their famously sun-kissed harmonies. One can only assume this, of course. Rehearsals are closed to outsiders.

The bass-player Timothy Schmit is leaving for the day. Glenn Frey has already gone. The two other members, Don Felder and Joe Walsh, are packing away their guitars. Felder has the neat appearance, firm handshake and sunny demeanor of a man who runs a thriving Lexus concession in Beverly Hills. Walsh, with his grey hair and budget casualwear, looks like a grumpy geography teacher. 'We're in training for the tour,' says Walsh. Can he be serious? His middle-aged spread is rolling over his waistband. What kind of training? I ask~ 'Just playing, man,' says Walsh wearily. 'You do a three-hour set and you get calluses on your calluses.'

When the Eagles broke up in 1980 (although it was not until 1982 that the break was made formal) they were one of the biggest-selling rock acts in the world. Their album Hotel California, recorded in 1976, has sold more than 14 million copies. The Eagles Greatest Hits Vol.1, has sold 22 million copies, making it the second best-selling album of all time (only Michael Jackson's Thriller has sold more).

They were famous for two things: their seamless harmony on stage and, towards the end, their conspicuous lack of it offstage. Their final performance, a benefit concert for the Democratic senator, Alan Cranston, in Long Beach, California, in 1980, was not untypical.

'We were onstage,^’ guitarist Glenn Frey would later remember, 'and Felder looks back at me and says, "Only three more songs until I kick your ass, pal." And I'm saying, "Great, I can't wait." We were singing Best of My Love but inside both of us were thinking, "As soon as this is over, I’m going to kill him."'

Rich, jaded, locked in mutual enmity, the group went their separate ways, vowing that they would never play together again. 'There'll never be a greed and lost-youth tour,' Frey promised in 1982. The Eagles would reunite 'only when hell freezes over'.

In 1993, however, their manager, Irving Azoff, faxed the media a message to excite the pulses not only of aficionados of Seventies rock, but of music business accountants across the word-- It said simply, 'Hell has frozen over'.

Within a year, the group's 'comeback album', Hell Freezes Over an MTV concert recording of their greatest hits, supplemented by four new tunes - was at the top of the American charts. Following a tour of America and the Far East, they topped the 1995 earnings chart for entertainer sin the US, with an income of nearly pounds 50 million.

Cynics, I say to Henley, have suggested that behind the explanations about the joys of reunion, the healing of old wounds, the enduring call of the music, lurks the inescapable fact that this is pay-day.

'Yeah, well' Henley gives this some thought. 'It is. We worked long and hard; we’ve earned it.' He swigs from his mineral water. 'It is pay-day.'

California has always occupied a special place in rock music mythology, embodied in the arcadian, endless-summer idyll of the Beach Boys, the smoky Sturm und Drang of the Doors.

In their first incarnation through the Seventies, the Eagles posited a different vision of California. With their long hair, patchwork denims and turquoise jewelry, they looked, as one commentator of the time had it, 'like Jesus Christ after a month in Palm Springs'.

Their airy melodies and sweet harmonies evoked the space and freedom of the high desert and the open roads - take it easy! Their lyrics shifted between buoyant idealism and melancholic introspection (one song on their debut album was actually entitled Most Of Us Are Sad) that epitomized the solipsism of so much Californian music of the day.

Of course, none of the group actually came from California. While Henley, the son of the manager of an auto-parts store, grew up in Texas, the band's co-founder, and Henley's songwriting partner, Glenn Frey,. came from Detroit - a young musician so ambitious that his own mother once recalled telling him that he reminded her of a rattlesnake. 'Glenn,' she added, 'loves that description.

They met at the Troubador club, at that time the hub of the Los Angeles music scene, where the likes of David Crosby, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt would hold court, among a supporting cast of struggling musicians, groupies, music biz honchos and wannabes. It was a place where, as one waitress would later remember, 'You had to wear a diaphragm to walk through. The semen potential in the bar was so intense it was enough to get you pregnant just standing there.'

Together, Henley and Frey worked in Linda Ronstadt's backing group before joining Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon, and coming under the wing of the young David Geffen. Later to become the most powerful man in the American entertainment industry, Geffen had only recently formed his own record company, Asylum - Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell were his first signings.

The Eagles' first album, recorded curiously enough in London in 1972, defined their style as a more commercialized, radio-friendly variant of the 'country-rock' popularized by such artists as Gram Parsons, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Byrds.

'I think,' says Henley, 'we did what every artist would like to do. We captured our time and our culture. All the mythology about the West, as a place where anything is possible. The American myth about the lone-rider, the individual, the cowboy, the man who goes out alone on to the frontier and makes his own way in the world and faces danger and robs the bank and gets the girl.'

Henley chuckles mirthlessly. 'Now I think a lot of that is bullshit. It's a young man's fantasy and that kind of thinking is destroying our culture.

'But we were too young and naive to know any better. We grew up watching cowboy movies where the guy in the white hat is the good guy, and the guy in the black hat is the bad guy, and the good guy always beats the.bad guy.

'But now that I'm grown-up I see the way corporate America works is with a certain ruthlessness and a disregard for the community. Now that I'm an environmentalist, I take issue with this American idea of the frontier; the idea that we can live as individuals without being part of that web of community, that we can pollute all we want to. We all, figuratively, live downstream now. The world is too small.'

Then, as now, the Eagles were managed by Irving Azoff, bearded, pugnacious and a mere 5ft 3in tall, he was known as 'Your Shortness' to the band and 'the poison dwarf to his enemies. 'Irving,' an acquaintance would remember fondly, 'just loved to kill over the telephone.'

Azoff’s basic negotiating tactic - 'Figure out a fair price, add a third and that's what we get in our contracts' - would make the Eagles rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And the Eagles had always been dreamers.

By the time of their fourth album, One of These Nights, in 1975, they were the biggest-selling group in America. In concert, the Eagles embodied the studiedly laid-back manners of California rock -Rolling Stone once described their performance as 'loitering on stage'. Offstage, they strived energetically to surpass the standards of extravagance and hedonism set by such rivals as the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

Glenn Frey once summarized the group's history as 'went on the road, got crazy, got drunk, got high, had girls, played music and made money'. He recalled, 'Led Zeppelin might argue with us, but I think we might have thrown the greatest traveling party of the Seventies.' This was the so-caIIed 'third encore', which would follow each show, involving the band, local music business people 'and as many beautiful girls as we'd meet from the airport to the hotel'.

They took Lear jets the way other people take taxis. To fly to Paris, 'for dinner'. To ferry Stevie Nicks, the Fleetwood Mac singer, back and forth between gigs when she was dating Don Henley. To fly in cases of Chateau Lafite Rothschild when Henley celebrated his birthday in Cincinnati.

By the time of their Hotel Califomia album in 1976, the breezy idealism of the group's early records had given way to sour disillusionment; their thirst for 'life in the fast lane', as their song famously put it, had turned to brooding on its consequences -'surely make you lose your mind'.

It was a lament for paradise lost beneath the album's glowing harmonies and its air of cultivated languor lay a palpable sense of disenchantment with life spent, as one critic had it, in 'a sunny hell of unsatisfying pleasures.

'Well, that was us,^’ says Henley. 'We weren’t on some pedestal passing judgment. We were living that life-style as much as anyone, but we were taking a step outside and looking at it. 'People always say that album was about California, but more than that it was about the decadence and extremism and cultural hedonism that is America.

'It's about too much of everything, and the ruthlessness that started in the Seventies, continued through the Eighties and on into the Nineties, with corporate take-overs and leveraged buyouts, plus sex and drugs. It was about excess.'

Everything, all the time, as the song has it?

'You can't be more concise than that,' says Henley with a nod. And is that what you thought you could have?

'Yeah. But the trick was to get work done, and to turn that into art. We worked extremely hard, and we played as hard as we worked, but we went on making pretty good albums until the very end. We were young and strong enough to maintain that kind of pace.'

At the height of their success, Henley remembers, he and Frey shared a house high in the Hollywood Hills which had once belonged to the actress Dorothy Lamour. At night, the whole of Los Angeles -- the whole of the world, it seemed - was spread out before them.

There was a studio in the house, a swimming-pool, a basketball court, a constant procession of ladies to the door. 'We used to look at each other and giggle and say, "It doesn't get much better than this." But we knew it would come to an end some day. We weren't completely without insight.

He pauses - a deliberate man, who weighs his thoughts carefully. 'That's the other difficult part of rock and roll. You know that you don't deserve it. You get too much money and too much of everything when you're too young, and it comes really quickly, and it messed me up for a while.

'I grew up in a town of 2,400 people; my dad didn't believe in credit cards; he paid cash for everything And suddenly I had a gold American Express card which I was embarrassed to take out of my wallet because I'd never done that before. I didn't want my friends to be jealous or angry.

'That's the other difficult part, when your success surpasses some of your friends who've been struggling just as long as you have, you get very guilty. You wonder, why me, not them? It took me a long time to get over that and I think I deserved what I got. But then, after a while, if you survive and you get better, there comes a time when you think, "Well, maybe I earned it now. Maybe I got better." That's the way I feel now.'

From the very beginning, disputation had been the oil in the Eagles machine. The writing partnership of Frey and Henley made them natural allies, and as their dominance in the group became more apparent so Meisner and Leadon began to feel progressively marginalized. 'Frey and Henley always had the common-leadership approach,' remembers Glyn Johns, who produced the group's first two albums. 'The other two were treated very much as country cousins in the songwriting department.' Frey and Henley wrote most of the big hits and dominated the group over successive changes of personnel. A fifth member, Don Felder, joined; Bernie Leadon, the original lead guitarist, left and Joe Walsh joined. Randy Meisner, the original bass-player left. Timothy Schmit joined. Resentments festered about whose songs would be recorded.By the time of what would be their final album, The Long Run, in 1979 the atmosphere within the group had degenerated into internecine bickering and personal rivalries. Felder and Frey were at each other's throats. The partnership of Frey and Henley was disintegrating. Henley accused the idiosyncratic Walsh of being 'a troublemaker'.

'They were quite feisty,' remembers the author Ed Sanders, who the Eagles commissioned to write an authorized biography at the time of recording The 'Long Run. 'They fought a lot. In fact, they fought so much I don't know how they ever stayed together. But they were bound together by the sinews of fame, money, groupies, all that. They were people from modest circumstances. We¹re talking about the American dream here: instant social mobility.'

Sanders had enjoyed an eccentric reputation in the Sixties as a poet, as the publisher of a literary journal called Fuck You, and as a member of a hippie-anarchist group, the Fugs, whose 'greatest hit' was an album entitled It Crawled Into My Hand. He had gone on to write the definitive history of the Manson family. Odd qualifications, perhaps, to write a biography of the Eagles.

'But I liked them,' he says. 'They sang beautifully and I admired their perfectionism. They were electronic folk-artists who reached out to a generation of people who had ignored the Sixties and celebrated booze and high-times and angst. It was as if Matthew Arnold wrote rock and roll lyrics.'

At 900 pages, Sander’s book was only marginally shorter than the Old Testament. 'I told it like I saw it,' he says. 'Sex, drugs and rock and roll.' But when it was finished, the group refused to allow it to be published. 'Ed had a unique style of writing,' says Henley carefully. 'But we decided we didn't want to parade our problems and our differences in public.'

In making The Long Run, the group were under enormous pressure to surpass the multi-million selling Hotel California. What was to prove their last hurrah was recorded in a mood of torment, paranoia and hostility, exacerbated by the group's spiraling consumption of cocaine.

A recording studio, says Henley, is like a submarine, a cocoon. You're listening to your music over and over again - tweaking the drum sound, the vocals: cocaine sharpens the mind, narrows the focus; the synapses sing; your energy is endless; you start to think everything is perfect, including yourself, but then again maybe it¹s not You roll it again and again. The days become weeks, become months. 'Then there's a point when it turns on you; the point where you over-focus and lose perspective. Now the trick is knowing when that point arrives, but of course, most people don't. So then you just keep on going.'

The Long Run took 18 months to record while the group's record company, Elektra, fretted on the sidelines, desperate to capitalize on the group's success. 'You're dealing with people who have so much money that there is no financial spur,' Joe Smith, the chairman of Elek:t:ra, complained at the time. 'We even sent them a rhyming dictionary.'

'Drugs aside,' Henley recalls, 'we were burnt~out physically, spiritually, creatively. We needed a break, but the machine wanted more. There were contracts to fulfill, concerts booked, we had to feed the monster. Making that record was one of the most miserable experiences of my life.'

For Henley, the pressures took a particular toll. Always of an anxious disposition, he suffered from ulcers and acute indigestion, to the point that the other members of the group teasingly nicknamed him Don Guano.

There is a story that during the spiraling madness that was the recording of The Long Run, Henley was moved to type a long memo to the studio manager insisting that the lavatory paper should come off the top, not the bottom of the roll. (If it was meant to come off the bottom, Henley reasoned, the little pink flowers would have been printed on the underside of the sheets.) 'It was a joke,' Henley later protested to a Rolling Stone writer who questioned him on the matter. 'But don't you think it should come off the top?'

With the album completed, the group set about fulfilling their touring obligations. In 1980 they played their final concert, in Long Beach, California.

Don Henley’s enthusiasm for extracurricular activities would make him something of a Hollywood legend. (He would subsequently feature in the book You'll Never Make Love In This Town Again, in the arresting account by a former 'girlfriend' of a soiree at Henley's home enlivened by the presence of five prostitutes, a sex-aid and immoderate amounts of the principal national export of Colombia.)

Shortly after the Eagles' final concert, Henley threw another party at his Hollywood home. In the early hours police arrived to discover a 16-year-old girl suffering from a drug overdose.

Henley was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana, cocaine and Quaaludes, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He was fined, put on two years' probation and ordered to attend drug counseling.

'I had no idea how old she was and I had no idea she was doing that many drugs,' Henley later explained. 'I didn't have sex with her: Yes, she was a hooker. Yes, I called a madam. Yes, there were roadies and guys at my house.

'We were having a farewell to the Eagles.'

Don Henley says that the break-up of the Eagles in 1980 was the worst period of his life. 'I just wasn't expecting it, y'know. And I was lost for a while there, drinking heavily, doing a lot of drugs.' Henley's voice tails off into an awkward silence.

Although Henley was the Eagle who would go on to enjoy the most successful solo career, one senses that psychologically the break-up affected him the most. 'I'd never planned on being a solo artist,' he says. 'I was sort of forced into that position and I really didn't know how I was going to go about it.'

With Frey off making records on his own, Henley found another writing partner, Danny Kortchmar, and 'struggled' to make his first solo album, I Can't Stand Still. It was the beginning of a successful solo career, although one senses that Henley was never happy with it.

He was at that time in a relationship with the actress Maren Jensen , who was suffering from Epstein-Barre (chronic fatigue) syndrome. He nursed her for a year, and when the relationship broke up he entered what he calls his second 'period of confusion'. More alcohol, more drugs.

'I think it was a habit of mine back then to go a little bit nuts when I began an album - to get all my feelings right on the surface so that I could draw from that. It was almost as if I'd create turmoil for that reason. And then I realized after a while that it was killing me, and there must be an easier way to be creative than to have to live every song.

'By the time I'd done the second album, Building the Perfect Beast, I'd regained some sort of confidence as an artist. And by the time I'd made my third one, The End of The Innocence, I felt really good about it.

'I sort of pulled myself together - but it was a long and frightening adjustment from being in a group to being a solo artist.^’

So it took you eight years to get over leaving the Eagles?

'That's right.' And the band had lasted 'Eight and a half'

Henley pauses. 'So around '90/91 everything started to come together for me. And then we started to discuss the reunion. Then I met my wife around '92 and things have been pretty good.

He swallows at his mineral water and falls silent.

Time, Henley suggests, has been a great healer of the ongoing feuds that once characterized the Eagles. 'We've all grown up some, I think. We're not as susceptible to all the drama that goes with being a big group, and we're not as vulnerable to the pressure from outside. We used to worry about every little thing, because we were the biggest group in America, the world, for a while and it was like, "Oh shit!!" - and that becomes a burden.

'Everything that gets that large topples under its own weight eventually. But there was nothing unique about our situation. All groups break up for the same reasons - you don't get along, and there's artistic conflict you don't get to sing enough songs, write enough, this, that and the other. And that was the situation with us. But everything's different now.'

So the Eagles are actually enjoying playing together again. But if money is not the only reason for the group to reform, says Henley, it is certainly one of them. He allows that, like the rest of the group, he is already an extremely wealthy man. 'But, hopefully not sounding disingenuous, I give a lot of my money away. If you talk to my accountants, they have headaches because I give so much away.'

'Don has always cared about issues beyond the usual decadence,' says one acquaintance. 'There are all kinds of rock stars who are purely monsters of narcissism, but Don Henley isn't one of them.'

During the Seventies, largely at Henley's instigation, the group made large contributions to environmental and American Indian campaigns, and performed benefits for Jerry Brown when he was running for governor of California and Alan Cranston.

Henley himself is known as a regular player of benefit concerts. In the week I met him he was playing concerts to raise money on behalf of multiple sclerosis research (his wife suffers from the illness, although it is presently in remission), and for a hospital in Texas where his mother is being treated for breast cancer.

He funds an educational trust in Texas and is the founder and chairman of the Walden Woods Project, which over the past six years has raised more than $14 million to preserve the area around Walden Pond in Massachusetts where the writer Henry Thoreau lived and worked.

Henley came to the work of Thoreau and his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his early 20s, when his father was dying of heart disease. 'I was looking for the big questions: why are we here, where are we going, why do good people die early. The First Baptist Church wasn't working for me, so I found Emerson and Thoreau and transcendentalism. I could see God in nature rather than in the church, listening to someone yell at me about hellfire and damnation.'

The Walden Woods Project is now funding the establishment of the Thoreau Institute, which will house a library, climate-controlled archive and educational facilities in a hunting lodge near Walden Pond.

These days, says Henley, the Eagles is not why he gets out of bed in the mornings. 'I don't want this to be taken in the wrong way, but it's not quite as important as it used to be. To be the biggest group in the world, or to be incredibly popular There are things that are more important to me now. I'm still extremely grateful for this, that we're still in demand, but it just isn't my whole life now.

He has recently signed a solo contract, for three albums which, he says, 'will take me well into my 50s at the current rate of production'. Will the Eagles record together again? They are undecided. 'But I'll tell you this. We will not tour again unless we make a brand new record. We have enough integrity not to do that.'

It was a popular conceit in the Seventies for rock musicians to style themselves as modem-day outlaws, beyond the purview of law and common morality. The Eagles recorded an album about precisely that - Desperado, a concept album based on the exploits of the Dalton gang. They are photographed on the cover in blue-jeans, bandoleros and spurs.

Nobody believes that rock stars are outlaws any more, if they ever did. The music industry, as Henley points out, is simply 'another tentacle on the octopus' of big business. And few groups are bigger business than the Eagles.

What happened to the Dalton gang,' says Henley, 'was that they robbed one too many banks, they got caught and killed. We knew that one day it would be over for us. And it was. And we're back again, which may or may not be a mistake.'

He swallows the last of his water. 'Maybe this is our robbing one too many banks.'

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