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What do you say to an 18-year-old who's already a veteran superstar and has presumably suffered more interviews than the average middle-aged entertainer, yet has had so little to do with the mechanics of his career that he might as well be Elvis Presley?

I suspect that Presley would turn out to be as enthralling as a sheet of damp cardboard if he was ever properly interviewed; I had the same qualms about wasting Michael Jackson's time. However, here I was in Fort Worth, Texas ("Cow-Town" to its close neighbor, Dallas) and there was winsome Mr. Jackson, sitting politely in a neutral hotel room waiting for my first question, half-an-hour before he had to cross the road for a performance in the local arena.

Now don't get me wrong here. I've nothing against the Jacksons in general or Michael in particular. On the contrary, I think that the group have already been featured on more classy pop records than it's given to the majority of groups to make and that Michael is as flush with talents as others of his age are with acne. But is he a driver, a passenger, or just a vehicle for slick merchandising in one direction and the retrieval of abounding booty in the other? Whichever, I found him to be friendly, but distant to the point of haziness, and as simultaneously insubstantial and impenetrable as a midnight fog.

All in all, we didn't have a lot to say to one another.

I didn't think you'd want to know his taste in girls, his size in shoes, his zodiac sign or what he had for breakfast, so I edged in sideways with a comparison between the traditional pop razzamatazz surrounding the Jacksons and the backlash against all things glossy that's currently sweeping Britain. I might as well have offered Impressionism to a Victorian Art Critic as a viable alternative to Renaissance masterpieces. It's not so much that we discussed the respective merits as that he didn't seem to believe that anyone could be so crass. And when I expounded on the numerous reasons why Barry White offends me, he obviously marked me down as one of those limey eccentrics that used to inhabit Hollywood B movies.

Ah well, back to more mundane matters. Has recording in Philadelphia been much different to the Motown sessions? Marginally, it seems, it has. Marginally.

"We rehearsed the songs for a whole week before we ever recorded in Philadelphia. With Motown we learnt the songs in the studio or in an office the same day we recorded them. The producers in Philadelphia give more freedom. They don't even sit in the producer's chair; they just sit back like anybody else in the studio so you never know who the producer is. It's not good for a singer to be told to do it like this or do it like that. Of course we were so young when we started at Motown, we needed direction. Later on we wanted to do it our way, which we did. Sometimes we didn't."

Ahem. Quite so. So the Corp still hasn't fully exploited its vaults then?

"There were some great songs that they haven't used which Stevie Wonder recorded with us; they can release those whenever they want to. He recorded about six songs with us. There's an artist that's a zillion light years ahead of everybody else. His sound is like what all the groups will be doing ten years from now. He's a genius."

I'd have begged to differ but the mists of misunderstanding were wafting close by so I let it pass. Anyway, I was in Fort Worth to discover Michael Jackson, not Stevie Wonder.

Being the undisputed heartthrob of the group, perhaps the part of his career he's been most actively involved in has been the interaction between himself and the seething masses of nymphettes that are apt to shriek hysterically and fall about limbs akimbo, every time he so much as opens his mouth. Almost all entertainers in such a position are bound to be desensitized to some extent, many finding it increasingly difficult to think of their fans as individual humans rather than a collective meat market. I don't think Michael Jackson is that far removed from everyday people yet, but there was a definite blurring of his already hazy personality when he described a couple of recent incidents involving the Jacksons and their fans.

Giggling nervously while explaining his concern, he referred to the promotional appearance the group had just made in Dallas.

"It was an in-store thing. We had to go in to sign autographs so they made a corridor for us to get through the people, because the kids were pulling and snatching. When we got inside we were all scratched up and everything. We started signing autographs but too many kids were jammed in there and they started taking our albums out of the store, stealing them, so we had to get everybody out again. We didn't get to see everybody, it was getting rough--we had to leave.

"That one wasn't too bad though. We did one in San Francisco in February...it's not funny at all what happened, I don't know why I laugh because it was so bad. We got inside and there was this big window and all these people started pushing up against the glass. It's not funny," he reminds himself again, "the whole glass came down.

"See, the thing is, they tell them to get back but they just won't. The policemen and the people were all pushed up against this thing and suddenly it just came crashing down. It sounded like an earthquake. Three girls got their throats cut and a boy got his head cut. There was blood all over the place, it was so bad. It's dangerous and frightening when it gets like that. I don't want things to get that bad...little children getting hurt and everything.

"Like we did a concert last week and one of our speakers fell on a girl. She was brought backstage and she was laughing. There was a big hole in her nose, she was bleeding all over, yet she said she was glad she got hurt because it gave her a chance to meet us. As the ambulance took her away she said was feeling happier than she'd ever been in life. I kinda feel sorry for kids like that."

I refrained from answering his comments either way, perhaps because I'm unsure of my own attitude. It is a tricky situation for a supergroup to negotiate. Either they stay accessible to their public and get accused of irresponsibility or they withdraw and get accused of old-fart elitism.

What really bothered me was Michael's attitude to the Jacksons' music. "We want to give the people what they want," he summarized. "We just flow with the sound, the style."

Thank you and goodnight. Show me the way to go, please.

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