When 'Thriller' came out, my parents stayed up until midnight to see the worldwide premier of the ground-breaking video. They then went out and bought not only the album, but the 7” and 12” singles to try and find the full length version of the song from the video. There were no internets then to steal it from. I listened to the album as a child and loved it. It made me want to learn more so I went through my dad’s Motown collection to find Jackson Five material, (this also got me into Motown). I acquired the VHS video Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller to not only see the whole video, but also the rehearsals and other songs.

Then the TV special Motown 25 was shown, my parents taped it as it was late at night, but it soon became a permanent fixture in our video player. Jackson performed with his brothers a medley of Jackson Five/The Jacksons hits, and then sang 'Billie Jean'. This in my opinion was his finest hour. When he did the moonwalk it just looked magic. It was as if he was being pulled along, nobody could surely do that!

I could moonwalk, but only in trainers and only on wet grass. Not ideal if I was going to take up dancing!

The Bad tour was probably the last time I got truly excited by Michael Jackson. I videoed every bit of news, and every performance that got a television showing. My school friend Tunde and I even formed a fan club. Later that year I Santa brought me my first record player. My own record player for my bedroom. The man in red also brought along 7” copies of 'Bad' and 'The Way You Make Me Feel'.

Everyone has a Michael Jackson era of their own. Mine ended around this time, and the Dangerous era largely passed me by. I was a moody teen by this time and had progressed to the ‘grunge’ scene via heavy metal and punk. I did watch a televised concert from this tour though out of curiosity and was saddened by what I saw. It seemed to me like he had forgotten what made him truly great. He went through the motions in an almost carbon copy of what I’d seen before on the Bad tour.

Since then his life was dogged by negative reportage from the gutter press about his private life. If you learned everything you knew about ‘Wacko Jacko’ from the British tabloids you would know he slept in an oxygen tent, lived on lentils, had the bones of John Merrick in his house, and contorted his face into an unrecognisable shadow of his good looking, black young self. Not through body dysmorphia, but through a desire to look like Diana Ross. Obviously it’s all bollocks.

On the discussion of child abuse, nobody will ever really know what happened. I don’t know if he was a paedophile, but if he wasn’t a billionaire would these parents have been so willing to allow their kids into the unsupervised company of a man in his forties? We know he didn’t have a childhood, due to the pressure of child stardom, (and many child stars have a fucked up adulthood) and was trying to compensate for this by living his childhood out as a grown up. He perhaps didn’t mean any harm, but he didn’t do himself any favours either.

The worse thing he did was surround himself with ‘advisers’ who were too scared to say no to him. His every whim, however outlandish, was catered for because the leaches who attached themselves to him didn’t want the money to stop coming their way.

In years to come it will be the music that mattered, not the lifestyle. Although having said that, mud sticks. The man on the street has had several opinions on the whole Jackson discussion, ranging from “good music, fucking nutter though” right down to “paedo”. So time will tell. Hopefully his musical legacy will be strong enough to shine through these clouds of his alleged home life.