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Few are the writers who've actually sat at the feet of the King of Pop. One such was British writer John Pidgeon, who in 1980 pitched up at the Jackson compound in Encino to find that his questions had to be directed to MJ through his then-barely-known baby sister Janet. Here's what ensued… -- Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

IN JANUARY 1980, the gates of 4641 Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino were open, unguarded. As I parked, an Alsatian bounded to the car and bared his teeth, paws skittering against the door, strings of saliva smearing the window, but it was barking, not growling, so I got out and headed for the house, the dog bouncing noisily in front of me.

A PR woman greeted me at the door, which she closed on the dog, and I waded after her through shaggy ivory carpet, chandeliers twinkling like lights in an elfin grotto, until, approaching a doorway, she slowed and stopped me with her arm.

"One thing," she said, as if it were an insignificance she had overlooked and just remembered, "you don't mind if his sister sits in on the interview, do you?"

Already aware of a distant figure on a marshmallow sofa, I shook my head readily.

"Of course not," I assured her with a smile. "What's her name?"

"Janet."

"Janet," I repeated.

"Oh, and one more thing..." The publicist waited for my eyes to meet hers. "If you could direct your questions to Janet, she'll put them to Michael."

My mouth opened to query this extraordinary request, but the arm that had been barring my way was behind me now, launching me through a double doorway and down several carpeted steps into the presence of he-who-must-not-be-addressed-directly, while I struggled to convert a confused backward glance into a good-to-meet-you grin, and wondered whether I was permitted to say hello face to face or expected to channel my greeting via the kid sister too.

Michael Jackson stood up. I stuck out my hand and so did he. I held his flimsy fingers carefully, suddenly fearful that I might hurt him. He was stick-thin, with fine skin and hairs that had never seen a razor sprouting feebly here and there on his cheeks and chin. He still had brown skin, an afro and his own nose, as the cover shot of his then No 1 album Off The Wall confirms. The voice that welcomed me was tremulous. When I turned to say hullo to Janet, she grinned as if this might all be a game. Michael sat down again, and I perched on a hassock between brother and sister, separated by the glass top of a low table. I set my recorder on the floor beside my seat, plugged in the microphone and fumbled with the controls. Then I leaned across the table, waving the microphone like a metal detector, unsure where to point it.

I found out later that I wasn't the only interviewer who had been asked to go along with the wacky ritual of using 13-year-old Janet Jackson as a conduit for questions. While it was happening, I was too taken aback--and too concerned that a transgression of this ridiculous rule might bring the interview to an abrupt end--to ponder Michael's motives, but I have wondered about them since. Could it have been that it was Whitey he didn't want to be addressed directly by? That didn't seem likely. Was he acclimatizing a treasured sibling, intent herself on musical stardom, to the irritating, but necessary attention of interviewers? Just possibly, but again unlikely. In the end I concluded that what Michael craved wherever and whenever it could be accomplished was the erection of a protective barrier between himself and the rest of the world, symbolized by his habitual wearing in public of dark glasses, and later, several notches more bizarrely, a mask.

For a sizeable stretch of the years that separated Muhammad Ali's retirement from the ring--too many big fights too late--in December 1981 and Nelson Mandela's release from Victor Verster Prison in February 1990, Michael Jackson must have woken each morning with a giggle. How else to treat being the most famous black man on the planet? He hadn't achieved that status by thrilling the world with agility and sleight of hand and unprecedented speed allied to reckless bravery, then risking all he had won to assert his belief; nor had he languished in prison for 28 years, hoping to live, but prepared to die for his cherished ideal of a democratic, free and equal society. No, during those eight years of world domination the greatest danger Michael Jackson faced was during a shoot for a Pepsi TV commercial, when an exploding firework set light to his hair. But he did make the biggest-selling album of all time, a record whose sales have topped 40 million copies.

True, in achieving this Guinness-Book-Of record, he united black and white record buyers in greater numbers than any other recording artist, and even overcame apartheid of a kind when Thriller and its seven top ten hit singles were played on otherwise lilywhite American radio stations. But Jackson was an exception and, unlike Ali or Mandela, changed no rules.

As his fame spread across the globe, his behavior became incrementally erratic. He dressed like a foppish despot, pampered himself with the gewgaws of a princeling, raised a drawbridge between himself and the outside world, eventually completing his metamorphosis into a fairground-owning, chimp-hugging, toddler-dangling, pigmentation-denying, underage-bed-sharing, cosmetic-surgery-junkie freak.

I missed media-shunning: one of the first symptoms of his unraveling. In the whole of 1982, he would grant just one interview, to Rolling Stone, and after that none--not one, instead eleven years of total silence--until his vainglorious, self-defeating confessional with Martin Bashir in 2003. But in January 1980, with his Off The Wall album cresting the album charts and its sublime stand-out track, "Rock With You" a No 1 single, he agreed to be interviewed by me. Was it the weight of this honor that had me clearing my throat several times?

"Yes... so, er, I was going to... I mean, um," I began, ever the polished professional, looking from one Jackson to the other, unsure whose eyes to settle on, "if we could sort of go back to er... to er, you know, when you got started... er, when the Jackson Five got started... um, I was going to ask Michael how... they... fitted in to the Motown set-up?"

A pause.

"Michael, how did you fit into the Motown set-up?"

Thank you, Janet. Yes, that's what I was trying to say.

A longer pause.

"Errrrrr..." Michael's own hesitation was prolonged and curiously musical. If it had cropped up on a vocal track, his new producer Quincy Jones would, I'm sure, have left it on the record for texture. "We were doing a show at the Regal Theatre in Chicago and it was like a talent show type of thing and we won, and Gladys Knight was there as well as a guy named Bobby Taylor, and they told Motown about us, and Motown was interested in seeing us audition for them..."

The version originally offered for public consumption was that Diana Ross had discovered the Jackson 5, so I was chuffed to hear Gladys Knight given due credit, especially as she was an infinitely superior singer to la Ross and her and the Pips' Didn't You Know You'd Have To Cry Some Time? was one of my favorite records.

"...So we went to Berry Gordy's mansion in Detroit--indoor pool--and all the Motown stars were there, the Supremes, the Temptations, the Marvelettes, the Miracles, and we auditioned and they loved it, and Diana Ross came over to us special after the concert we did for them and she kissed us all and said we were marvelous and she said she wanted to play a special part in our career and that's how it started..."

Berry Gordy's mansion made a big impression on Michael and his brothers, the indoor pool especially. It was by far the biggest house the Jacksons had ever been invited into. Their own place in Gary, Indiana, was one story with two bedrooms, one for parents Joe and Katherine, the other for the nine kids. Signing to Motown split the family up, some of the boys moving in with Gordy, the rest with Diana Ross, until Joe bought the house on Hayvenhurst Avenue in 1971.

"...And we did our first single, "I Want You Back," it was gold, as well as "ABC," "The Love You Save," "Never Can Say...", on and on and on."

A tinkerbell giggle.

"That's how it started."

And that's how the interview continued: me pinging a question to Janet, she ponging it to Michael, he pinging it back to the microphone. I almost got used to the process.

"Motown was supposed to have been one big happy family. Was it still like that when the Jacksons were there?"

"Was Motown like a big family then, Michael?"

"Yes, that's very true, they were. Everybody worked together. You'd be doing a session and Berry Gordy would just walk in and change things around and nobody would get mad. It was like the way Walt Disney would go from one studio to the other like a bee, you know, and pollen, just go from one place to another, just stimulating people, keeping them on the right track. Berry's really something."

That something, I reminded myself, was a heavy-handed patriarch who allowed his energy to be diverted by a hubristic desire to make Diana Ross a movie star and himself a Hollywood mogul, so that the label he had started in 1959 with money he'd made writing crossover hits for Jackie Wilson, which had not only become "The Sound of Young America," but the most profitable black-owned business in America, was now under threat in the music marketplace.

The sound that took its name from the Detroit "motor town" of its birth was losing ground to the sweet soul of another industrial centre, Philadelphia. The Philly sound was smoother, slicker than Motown's, and earned a slew of hits for the Stylistics, the O'Jays, Motown refugees the Spinners, the Three Degrees, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. Confirmation that the city was hot, if wall-to-wall platinum discs in the Philadelphia International offices were not enough, came when David Bowie chose Sigma Sound Studio as the location to record his 1975 Young Americans album. So, when the Jacksons--Berry Gordy having used the law to reinforce Motown's claim to the Jackson 5 name--moved to CBS in 1976, naturally their new record company put them into a studio with Philly kings Gamble and Huff.

"We came up with some pretty good songs with them--"Show You The Way To Go," which was a big hit, as well as, um..."

Janet had to prompt Michael here, "'Enjoy Yourself.'"

"'Enjoy Yourself'--thank you," he giggled, as did his sister, but excused himself by adding, "so many songs. And, er, since we'd been in the studio so many years, something just told us that we should start doing our own thing, so we went in and we wrote the Destiny album, and that was double platinum." The memory of this achievement released another cascade of giggles.

Sales statistics clearly count with Michael. All he had to say about the wonderful "I Want You Back" was that it went gold. Who gave a damn how many copies it had sold? What mattered was that it was two minutes and forty seconds of pop-soul heaven. And Destiny? Double platinum. As if that made it better than "I Want You Back," which it wasn't. Come March 1984 CBS would host a party to celebrate Thriller's inclusion in the Guinness Book Of Records as the biggest-selling album of all time, prompting Michael to admit that his entry in the book marked the first time in his career that he felt he had accomplished something. But if art were all about sales figures, then Vladimir Tretchikoff, painter of the blue-skinned 'Chinese Girl,' would be up there alongside Picasso as No 1 artist of the 20th century.

There was room in my head for these thoughts, because I was barely listening to Michael's answers, which were consistently unilluminating. It quickly became clear that he had little understanding either of the history of black music or of his place in it. Aware that I shouldn't expect insights, I nonetheless had what I had come for: the voice of Michael Jackson on tape. So I didn't bother correcting Janet when my question about Destiny--"Apart from its commercial success, since the Jacksons had written and produced the album themselves, were they also pleased creatively with what the record?"--emerged from her mouth as, "D'you think your brothers could've done better?" In fact, it was what I should have asked him.

"I certainly did. I'm sure the brothers did too, because I'm never satisfied with anything 'cause I do believe deeply in perfection. If you're satisfied with everything, you're just going to stay at one level and the world will move ahead." A thought that had him laughing again. "That's not good either."

The Destiny recording was the last time the Jacksons enjoyed Michael's undivided attention. Even while they were on tour promoting the record, he was Lear-jetting back to LA as often as the schedule allowed, to work on tracks for Off The Wall. This was the first record for which he had been allowed to choose his producer, and he had picked Quincy Jones, whom he had got to know two years before during the filming of The Wiz, a Motown-produced remake of The Wizard Of Oz in which Michael played The Scarecrow and Diana Ross an absurdly over-aged Dorothy. The film was a disaster and, incongruously, in view of what happened subsequently, Jones made a hash of his brief as musical director, which was to inject the score with danceable music.

"I called Quincy up one day, I said, 'Quincy, I'm ready to do a solo album. I'm going to produce it too, but I want somebody to work with me. Can you recommend somebody?' I wasn't trying to hint around at all"--Michael laughed at the notion--"I didn't even think about him, and he said, 'Smelly'--he calls me Smelly [the nickname deriving from Michael's aversion to the word "funky"]--he said, 'Smelly, why don't you let me do it?' I said, 'That's a great idea.'"

Michael knew this story by heart. A month or so before, in conversation with Stephen Demorest, another interviewer who was asked to channel his questions through Janet, he had told it all but word for word: "Quincy calls me Smelly and he said, 'Smelly, why don't you let me do it?' I said, 'That's a great idea.'"

Whatever Michael's mounting problems, his voice, an instrument of rare beauty and expression, was not one of them. The purity of note, the timbre, was, I suppose, an accident of nature, but in order to express feelings, a singer has to be able to feel, to have felt. Yet Michael's mollycoddled existence must have isolated him from a multitude of essential feelings. So from where did the experience come that imbued his beautiful voice? My question didn't quite come out like that, especially after it had been paraphrased by Janet, but Michael got the gist of it.

"There is no real explanation. It's nothing to do with personal experience. My singing is just--I'll say it simple as possible--it's just Godly really. It's no real personal experience or anything that make it come across, just feeling and God, I'll say, mainly God."

Michael was 21 and he had been a star half his life. Ten years is a longer career than most in music. How did he see the next ten?

"I think secretly and privately, really deep within, there's a destiny for me. I've had strong feelings for films, that something's directing me in that way for motion pictures, musicals and drama, that whole thing, to choreograph the films as well, even get into writing the pictures and doing the music."

The closest he has come to realizing that destiny was the 14-minute werewolf video he created for Thriller, hardly a Hollywood career. He also recorded a narrative E.T. spin-off album, The E.T. Storybook, at Steven Spielberg's invitation. The package included a poster of Michael with his arm round E.T.'s shoulder, the two most readily identifiable eighties icons side by side. But I didn't know that at the time, so I couldn't contradict him. Instead I asked him how he felt about his music being labeled disco.

"I hate labels, because it should be just music. Call it disco, call it anything, it's music to me, it's beautiful to the ear, and that's what counts. It's like you hear a bird chirping, you don't say, 'That's a bluejay, this one is a crow.' It's a beautiful sound, that's all that counts, and that is a ugly thing about men. They categorize too much, they get a little bit too racial about things, when it should all be together. That's why you hear us talk about the peacock a lot, because the peacock is the only bird of all the bird family that integrates every color into one, and that's our main goal in music, is to integrate every race to one through music, and we're doing that."

On the sleeve of the Jacksons' Triumph album, released later that year, Michael would write, "In all the bird family, the peacock is the only species that integrates all colors into one... We, like the peacock, try to integrate all races into one, through the love and power of music." Evidently he wanted to try the analogy out on me before airing it to a wider public. Just as well that I nodded approvingly. "When you go to our concerts, you see every race out there, and they're all waving hands and they're holding hands and they're smiling. You see the kids out there dancing, as well as the grown-ups and the grandparents, all colors, that's what's great"--cue one last nervous giggle--"that's what keep me going."

The second reel of tape was about to spool off, so I told Janet that sounded like a good place to end, pressed stop, wound off the rest of the reel and stowed it carefully in the box from which I'd unwrapped it. Michael withdrew from me the moment the interview was over. He remained in the room, but he wasn't there for me. The publicist showed me out without offering an explanation for her extraordinary precondition. The Alsatian had either been locked away or, knowing I was unafraid, couldn't be asked to come out and bark. When I keyed the ignition in my car, "Rock With You" came on. I turned off the radio. My thoughts were a mixture of amusement and annoyance at the pantomime I'd allowed myself to take part in and disappointment that I hadn't learned anything about Michael Jackson or Motown that I didn't already know. I reminded myself that I hadn't really expected to, and, as long as my machine hadn't let me down, I had his precious voice on tape.

His next album would be so big, there was nowhere for Michael to go afterwards but down. From being able to do no wrong, thereafter he would be able to do little right. Everything about him would become fair game for speculation, denigration and vilification: his single glove, his sun glasses, his epauletted outfits, his ludicrous disguises, his surgical mask, his nose and chin jobs, his pigmentation, his pet chimpanzee Bubbles, his tie-up with Don King, his hokey marriages, his reckless extravagance, his colossal debts, his bed-sharing with young boys, his pay-offs to their parents, his child-abuse trial and eventual acquittal, which did nothing to stop the speculation, but left his career, reputation and finances in ruins.

As long as he was Nabob of Neverland, he could justify his reclusion by claiming that owning a theme park and zoo meant never having to leave home, but his hermetic lifestyle mirrors that of Elvis Presley, whose isolation contributed to his decline as surely as the daily Demarol.

When I met Michael almost 30 years ago, although our verbal communication was indirect, we sat face to face, pressed flesh on flesh, breathed the same air. He was odd, but, as pop stars went, unexceptionally so. It's tempting to conclude that what unhinged him was fame. Granted he had already been famous for ten years, but the eminence that awaited him was of an altogether greater magnitude. Even in 2009 its afterglow has induced a million fans to buy a ticket for his 50-date run at the O2 Arena, although, with some early dates put back until 2010, how many of those ticket holders are 100% confident that their reward will be a night of Michael Jackson magic, rather than a refund?


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