Tonight:
4°c
I can remember the moment when Michael Jackson became the most interesting person in the known world.
Directly after the last round of molestation and child abduction charges in Santa Barbara, the great performer decided to visit his friend Sheikh Abdullah in Bahrain.
No sooner had he arrived in the not-entirely-tolerant state when he decided it might be fun to enter the ladies' loos at the Ibn Battuta Mall in female headgear and positioning himself at the mirror to put on his make-up.
Whatever you thought of Jackson, it's hard to deny his originality or his authority as a pop cultural changeling: with his voice and his moves, his choice in friends, his many faces, to say nothing of his spaceship clothes and variable headgear, he long ago became an artist who made David Bowie look like a member of the General Synod.
But what explains his journey from cute little black boy with immense talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who impersonated Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson was a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship.
His every move showed him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood.
He might have made us laugh but he also frightened us into recognising the excesses we demand of those we choose to entertain us.
For my money he also constituted a mind-boggling and vaguely uplifting example of human instability in pursuit of perfection.
In a sense he was all of the show-business spectacles we have ever known rolled into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland.
We wanted to see him as pop's greatest distortion of human nature, which he might have been, but he was also weirdly in tune with our times.
Jackson's mother, Katherine, a Jehovah's Witness, has said Michael never quite seemed like a child, that even in his nappies he “felt” old.
At little over a year and a half he would stand with his bottle and dance to the rhythm of the washing machine.
Joseph, his father, was angry and ambitious, an excellent if often sorry combination in the parent of a child who wants to be successful in show business.
Everything bad for a child might be good for a performer — even, I suspect, being locked in a cupboard by one's father — and the horrors of his childhood very soon became part and parcel of Jackson's act.
In many ways the early career of the Jacksons is a classic American show-business story except that the boys were black and suburban and became unprecedentedly popular in white America.
Only in the early 1980s, after Jackson went solo, did he go from being a musical genius to being a genius at selfhood.
He remade his nose, he began to wear make-up every day, to fashion himself as an only child and a lost boy and to disappear into a region of total ambiguity.
Jackson had what might be called a supernatural relation to his own personality, which, far from holding him back in the real world, led to the making of his album Thriller, the biggest-selling album of all time (50 million sales, plus seven Top Ten singles).
That level of success seems both to have enlarged his sense of messianic purpose and deepened the role of fantasy in his life.
We found it impossible to imagine he would ever grow up.
At the start of Peter Pan, we see a little boy, spying on the Darling children being reconciled with loving parents and their normal lives.
“He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know,” wrote Barrie, “but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.”
