INTRODUCTION

Michael Jackson was breaking records as a big-selling pop star before he was a teenager and went on to set standards for commercial success by selling upwards of 50 million copies of one piece of work, Thriller. His other solo albums recorded as an adult have sold in the region of another 50 million and he sold millions of singles as a child star fronting The Jackson 5. He became one of the richest individuals in the world.

He could have anything he wanted and do anything he wanted. He could be anything he wanted except private, a child again or immortal and some of hose things are probably hat he most wanted. He was not a poor little rich boy who inherited wealth. His fortune was generated by his talent. As a child he had no choice or control over how this talent was directed but he learned his crafts - singing, dancing, recording, writing - with a speed and thoroughness that impressed his elders.

The price exacted for these riches was well documented in a series of biographies, his personal memoir (he was too young to have written a definitive autobiography) and the biographies and autobiographies of other members of his family. You might know of large families, ruled by fear of the father, who have evolved to be every bit as dysfunctional as the Jacksons without the professional pressures - or the opportunities for counselling money can buy. Of course, wealth could not forever shore up a collapsing family structure. Look at the Windsors. It is ludicrous to expect that Michael Jackson (b 29 August, 1958) should have grown up “ordinary”. His was not an ordinary childhood. Jackie (b Sigmund Esco Jackson, 4 May, 1951), Tito (b Toriano Adaryll Jackson, 15 October, 1953) and Jermaine (b Jermaine La Jaune Jackson, 11 December, 1954), his three elder brothers, formed a trio in 1961.

Michael joined a few years later (with Marlon David Jackson, b 12 March, 1957), his singing and dancing thrusting him to the fore. He’d been fronting the group for six years when the commercial ball started rolling in 1969. He was 11, something of a veteran and fast becoming the family’s meal ticket. He, not the father, was their breadwinner. And for a short while he was central to Motown’s financial stability.

Remarkably, he was one of the few child stars who was a bigger star as an adult. Although Motown had parlayed a “child genius” Little Stevie Wonder into a mature star, the burn-out rate among pop music child stars is roughly equal to that of movie child stars. In 1956, Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers had four R&B hits in the US, two of which were Top 20 pop hits there, and ‘Why Do Fools Fall In Love?’, which Lymon had written at the age of 13, got to No 1 in the UK, the first of three British hits. Addicted to heroin for much of the Sixties, he died of an overdose in 1968, a year before The Jackson 5 burst onto the scene. By these tokens, Michael’s career should have ended in the Seventies.

The 5’s success in targeting a new, young audience spawned a rash of imitations, notably The Osmonds (a bizarre Battle of the Sects subtext here: Jehovah’s Witnesses versus The Mormons!). Since then, the teen and pre-teen market has never been without succour - New Edition, New Kids On The Block, Take That, East 17, Boyzone, rap acts like Kriss Kross, vocal groups who, as did the J5, base their acts on the vocal legacy of Sixties soul (Boyz II Men, Jodeci and so on) in Nineties clothes and dances.

According to some books, his father, a manipulator by fear, told Jackson he was not as good as he thought. Motown told him he was fabulous but had much to learn. When he thought he’d learned much and wanted some control, they told him he wasn’t as good as he thought. The press wrote that he was great, then not as good as he thought. Then he was fantastic, then weird, mad and much worse. He formed few lasting relationships with people of his own age outside his family because of the cocoon woven around him by family and record company, by his own shyness (another result of a cloistered upbringing), and by his dissatisfaction with his appearance, which was not helped by virulent teenage acne, teasing brothers and a taunting father.

The rest you will have read about in the newspapers.