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But the surprise — and, let’s be frank, mild frisson of excitement — when someone incredibly famous turns their toes up was tempered, in this case, by a sense of inevitability about it all. Jackson, you felt, was never going to make old bones. For years now his appearance had suggested an experiment that had gone terribly awry. What would he have looked like at 70? Would there have been any money left? Would he still have been making his increasingly useless records? Would he finally have been held up as the classic example of what appalling damage can be wrought by lifelong fame and celebrity?
His death allows us to forget all this and wallow in nice comfy nostalgia. In the 72 hours after his demise, the average adult in the UK heard Vincent Price’s voice-over on ‘Thriller’ 11.3 times on TV, radio and blaring out of shops and pubs. Private Eye’s phrase ‘takes out onion’ characterised most of the media coverage: everyone had decided, without obviously thinking about it much, that Jacko was the greatest pop star since Elvis and one of the towering figures of late 20th-century culture. And it is true, he did sell a hell of a lot of records. But if the bottom line were all that mattered, Titanic would be the greatest film of all time and Phantom of the Opera the only thing worth seeing in the theatre. (Dan Brown? Jeffrey Archer?)
The brutal truth is that Jacko was essentially washed up before the age of 30. In Neil Tennant’s memorable phrase, his imperial period lasted from, roughly, ‘Blame It On The Boogie’ in 1978 to the ‘Thriller’ video in 1984. Three years after that came Bad, one of the most disappointing albums ever made. At the time we thought he had merely succumbed to the overwhelming pressure of producing a follow-up to the bestselling album of all time. But while Thriller had astonishing confidence, a sense that Jacko could do anything with pop music and make it his own, Bad sounded like a man following trends rather than inventing or exploiting them. After that, the rest was just filling in time.
Pop music is of course a collaborative medium. During his imperial years, Jacko happened to work with a brilliant writer and arranger in Rod Temperton and a producer of enormous experience in Quincy Jones. They needed him as much as he needed them: their Jacko-free work of the same era wasn’t of the same standard. But after Temperton and Jones drifted away, Jackson lost his ballast. If a hundred complete tracks were recorded for the Dangerous sessions, as was often said at the time, it’s because Jackson had no one left to say, stop that, it’s crap. Other than critics and the public, who in later years said little else. Maybe we killed him, with our expectations unfulfilled. What a grim, sad life. How lucky we all are not to have had to live it.
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Also by Marcus Berkmann
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