A spectacle of pure narcissistic grace, it captivated the pop universe. Rolling Stone writer John Swenson once made the point that Jackson’s dancing wasn’t – like James Brown’s – physical. It was “metaphysical”, “a graceful illusion”.Jackson’s creepy, extra-terrestrial appearance (and habits) were the key to both his success and his undoing. Challenged only by Madonna (and maybe Prince and Springsteen), Michael Jackson would rule that decade.Late 1982 saw the release of Thriller, the biggest-selling album in pop history. Never has a single album so dramatically catapulted an entertainer into the stratosphere.

Good or lightweight, Thriller would never have been the pop Godzilla it was without the crucial performance Jackson gave on the Motown 25th Anniversary TV show in May 1993.Here, before an audience of millions, he sang Billie Jean and unveiled his incredible moonwalk dance. Released at the tail-end of disco, it took the Motown crossover principle into a new era: the Eighties, a decade in which black rhythms and plastic soul mannerisms would boss the sound of American pop. We were just happy someone showed the Osmonds how to do it right.The brothers were one of the last homegrown Motown successes, a product of the conveyor-belt system bluntly christened “The Corporation”. When the legendary label began to go off the boil in the mid-Seventies, the group exited Berry Gordy’s empire and made so-so dance records (Enjoy Yourself, Show You The Way To Go) for Epic. By 1977, Michael was chafing at the bit, wanting out but trapped by loyalty to his less talented siblings. Delivering him from this quandary was the movie version of Broadway musical The Wiz, in which he played the scarecrow.

It was on the set of this flick that Jackson first bonded with jazz/soundtrack veteran Quincy Jones, The Wiz’s musical director.When the furiously exciting, Jones-produced Don’t Stop (‘Til You Get Enough) first burst on to the radio in the late summer of 1979, it was obvious that Michael Jackson was going to be a star, and probably a superstar.This was a new Michael Jackson, a Michael who wasn’t going to fade out like all the other child stars, a Michael who knew he could make it up there with the great movie idols. Hell, maybe he’d even be as big as Mickey Mouse.The first solo album, Off The Wall, swung cleverly between smooth dance- pop (Rock With You, Off The Wall) and fragile, saccharine balladry (especially She’s Out of My Life, with its are-they-real-or-are-they-fake tears). Of course, we teeny-bopping fans knew nothing of the violence behind the happy Motown smiles when the famous 5 went through the expertly-choreographed motions of ABC and The Love You Save. In the Seventies, nobody knew (or admitted) that dysfunctional families existed.Years later, when black-sheep sister LaToya spilled all the beans, and even Michael confessed to having been beaten by his father, we shook our heads and said we’d always known there was something a bit iffy about the Jackson family But we didn’t know. The idea of Jackson at 40, married with children, is more jolting than the idea of doo-wop child star Frankie Lymon (celebrated in the forthcoming movie Why Do Fools Fall In Love?) dying of a heroin overdose at the age of 25.On the other hand, so many things have gone so horribly wrong for Michael Jackson in the last ten years that it would be strange if he “hadn’t” aged. Reality will do that to you.
The media’s creation of “Wacko Jacko” was bad enough, but it was nothing next to the disgust inspired by allegations that a 33-year-old Jackson had molested a 13-year-old Beverly Hills brat named Jordan Chandler. There are some scandals you bounce back from in America: paedophilia, proved or unproved, is not one of them.

Commercially, Jackson is now an outcast in his own homeland, of passing interest only to the insatiably prurient readers of The Globe and The National Enquirer.What is saddening about Jackson’s nightmarish Nineties’ decline is that we’ve forgotten what an extraordinary entertainer he was. One is not just talking about Billie Jean and the famous moonwalk. It’s footage of an eight-year-old Michael rehearsing a blues song with his brothers in which the tiny dynamo’s sheer chutzpah takes the breath away. Or there are the memories of the Jackson 5 yelping and twirling their way through I Want You Back on Top of the Pops. The kid was mesmerising.But perhaps that is part of the problem. If you’ve been groomed to simulate adult passion and eroticism at such a tender age, how do you cope when those feelings actually show up in adolescence and hormones start coursing through your confused, elongating body? And what do you do when, 20 years later, those feelings haven’t gone away?It doesn’t help coming from a family ruled by a despotic father, a man intent only on turning his children into successful entertainers.

Why? Because Michael seemed ageless, a mutant archangel who – with a little assistance from the the plastic artists of Beverly Hills – would stay forever young. “I was rather hoping we could make a non-broadcast series,” replied Cook, the slacker’s slacker.Peter Cook by Harry Thompson (Hodder & Stoughton pounds 18.99). THE IDEA that Michael Jackson has reached the ripe old age of 40 seems shocking,more shocking, indeed, than the fact that Keith Richards and Iggy Pop have comfortably cruised past the half-century mark. I find I’m watching television.”More typical of Cook in his latter years is this joke directed at his own indolence: “We could make a non-broadcast pilot,” Jonathan Ross said to him of some television project. And where he wounded others, it was often forgiven as his barbs were invariably funny. When David Frost phoned him to invite him to a party for Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, Cook consulted his diary before replying, “I’m sorry, I can’t on Wednesday.