What a hoot.

The Eagles' return to recording has been a long time coming. The band split in 1980 amid backstage punch-ups during The Long Run tour and famously said hell would have to freeze over before they reformed. It duly did and they have been touring since 1994.

Always controversial, the band seem to elicit a split response.

Protectors of great American folk rock or paragons of corporate rock? You decide. That they are unveiling the new album in a oneoff London gig later this month to invite-only industry bigwigs and media movers and shakers gives fuel to the latter's argument . . . that tickets are priced at just under �1,000 equally so. Message boards and blogging fans are not happy.

Then in the States they have decided to release Long Road Out of Eden exclusively through WalMart, further fanning the accusations that they are contrived money makers.

One thing that is unarguable is that The Eagles' are one of the most successful bands of all time.

They remain the only act to have three albums that have sold more than 10 million units: Their two greatest hits packages and 1976's Hotel California. Their Greatest Hits 1971 . . . 1975 is, quite simply, the bestselling album ever and overall they have sold more than 120 million albums worldwide.

Somehow the band have prevented the material from the new album from leaking online so it will be big bucks for them.

Some of the band's greener friends aren't too happy about the Wal-Mart distribution deal but Don Henley is unapologetic about his business goals. "Everyone has been screaming let's have a new paradigm in the record industry, " Henley told Billboardmagazine last week. "Let's figure out a way to do this ourselves. Let's figure out a way to leave the big dinosaur record companies behind that have been robbing from us . . . and the consumer . . . for the last 60 to 80 years. . . We just thought we would try something different. Some people have praised us for it and some people have damned us for it, but that's the way it goes. The business has changed so drastically. Wal-Mart is not a perfect company, but. . . they can't possibly be any worse than a major record label."

Fair enough. In Ireland the album is being promoted by a record company and will be on sale in stores from tomorrow week. "We didn't know how we were going to fit in with all this rap, hip-hop, grunge, emo and what have you, " Henley told an Australian newspaper earlier this month. "We couldn't see where it was going. So we waited. To be honest, we've come through a really lousy period of music. We didn't want to be a part of that."

It's a bit rich, listening to the album. Long Road Out of Eden is classic Eagles: super polished, crisply recorded, mid-tempo classic rock. It could have been recorded 10, 20, 30 years ago. "We still play instruments and sing, " says Henley. "There are still some of the processes that remain organic, and that's the way we want it. The computer still won't write lyrics for you. That still has to come by the sweat of the brow."

It centres on familiar Eagles themes such as surviving excess, fame, the political landscape . . . all delivered in the trademark laidback Eagles nomenclature. Undoubtedly a huge world tour is on the cards and it will likely break every record for receipts. The band are used to each other right now . . . family commitments and much lower drug use seem to keep the remaining members from getting on each other's nerves. The band are also reportedly close to signing a deal with the NFL to performer at the 2008 Super Bowl.

It's all a far cry from Felder's time. In his book he describes one of the last times they played, when, in the middle of 'The Best of my Love', Glenn Frey sidled over to him onstage and said: "F*** you. I'm gonna kick your ass when we get off the stage." Those days are, sadly, over.

RELEASED at the end of this month, The Long Road Out of Eden is a sprawling double disc of Eagles songs, some old, some written recently. The first CD serves as "a re-introduction" to the band's canon, according to Don Henley, while the second CD is a separate entity of songs dealing primarily with issues such as the ongoing war and loss of innocence, both in a personal and cultural sense, and ends on an ambiguous note with the band appearing to say this is this the last time they will record an album. Well, hell froze over before so I wouldn't take Henley & Co at their word. . .

The stated reason for taking 13 years between reforming to tour and actually recording is that they were waiting for all the rubbish in the charts to go away. "We've just been sort of waiting for some of this bad music to die down, for certain trends to go away, so we can get out there on the dance floor again, " Henley told Billboard last week.

'How Long' is the first single from the first disc. The Eagles first played on TV in Holland in 1974.

"My kids were watching YouTube one night, " explains Glenn Frey, "and they said, 'Dad, come here.

You've got to look at yourself.' I guess we did about eight or nine songs on this show and one of them was 'How Long.' My kids were laughing at how long my hair was, and there we were playing this JD Souther song. And my wife said, 'You should do this song Glenn, this is classic Eagles, ' and I said, 'You know, you're right.' I think we learned it but we didn't record it back in '74 because JD Souther wanted to use it on his first solo album, if I'm not mistaken."

The first CD kicks off with 'No More Long Walks in the Wood' with a haunting, eerie instrument that turns out to be an Afghan 'did uk', which is joined by several middle eastern instruments. The song is intended to be a damning indictment of US foreign policy.

"The White House is not vulnerable to criticism but we wanted to make a statement about empire, " says Henley. "Empires always fall. Empire building always crumbles to dust. We wanted to come at it from a different angle and I think we accomplished that."

Another theme is the cultural vacuum in which the US operates, none more so than media coverage of the trivial and its failure to grasp the nettle of the big issues in the war. 'Frail Grasp on the Big Picture' on the second disc is an attack on journalistic values. Why is there more coverage given to Britney Spears than a car bomb in Basra, why do we get annoyed when our partner leaves the cap off the toothpaste . . . the mundane juxtaposed with the important.

"I do think the media exacerbates the trouble in the world, " says Henley. "In this country, they engage in the journalism of conflict. American TV is disgusting. They try to get people to bark at one another; it's all about public humiliation and fighting and arguing and yelling.

It's ridiculous. At least if you turn on the TV or read a paper there are very serious matters like the war or global warming and right there beside it is Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. Things of monumental importance and trivia are sitting there side by side.

The media gives equal weight to each one and I find that absurd."

There is plenty of nostalgia for a more innocent past. 'No More Walks in the Wood' started out from a poem by John Hollander. "I do think there is a longing, " says Henley. "The past seems more innocent. . . A lot of our songs deal with innocence lost and a yearning for our lost youth, a lost past that seemed to be less complicated than now."

But is it the last Eagles album?

The last song features Henley singing about taking his curtain call, taking his bow and passing the baton on to the next generation. "Four songs are direct messages to our children, " he says.

"Two or three contain the most important lyrics on the album.

They are: "be part of something good/leave something good behind" . . . that's the message we wanted to leave for our children and everybody really. This may very well be our last album. I don't know if anybody wants to do this again, but never say never."

Long Road Out of Eden has an interesting lyric: "Weaving down the American highway, through the litter and the wreckage and the cultural junk." Henley believes this is the highway the US is running down right now. "I was originally going to write 'weaving down the information highway' because I get on my computer every day and there is so much crap on the internet. . . [But] I changed it back to American highway just to make it broader in scope. I think with the words 'cultural junk' I got my point across. I think we've cornered the market on cultural junk, pretty much. The coverage of this war has been, for the most part, nonexistent, except what the military wants us to hear and what the White House wants us to hear and see."