The First Book of Michael (22 page)

As Michael’s health deteriorated, so conversely increased the intensification of his efforts to relay, promote and safeguard his message of peace.

The ecstasy Michael experiences during the Wembley
Bad
tour performance of ‘I Just Can't Stop Loving You’, as the crowd sings those very words to him, is starkly evident. The
Bad
album was conceived from the very first as a stadium record, with the songs intended to be brought to life on stages across the world. And it's no coincidence that Michael hands the microphone over to the audience for the chorus in ‘I Just Can't Stop Loving You’, before explicitly, passionately imploring the crowd to, “Tell me! Tell me!”

There are many instances that showboat Michael’s capacity for generalising songs from his personal experience into a broader theme. In ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’, Michael sings that “Love is the answer… / This thing can’t go wrong…/ We can change all the world tomorrow.” Whilst in ‘Give in to Me’, his covert message to the world was, “It seems you get your kicks from hurting me…You and your friends were laughing at me in town… You won’t be laughing, when I’m not around”.

And truly, we are not.

Michael had been conditioned from a very young age to believe in a correlation between the volume of the ovation he received from an audience and the amount of love he deserved. During the twenty years between the record-breaking
Bad
Tour of 1988 and the ill-fated swansong of 2009, the set-list of his concerts and its choreography rarely strayed from the iconic hits of
Thriller
and
Bad
.  These were the songs of his hey-day, and so, naturally, were also the songs in which he received the loudest ovations. Michael needed to feel our love. Visitors to Neverland speak of the ranch as brimming with gifts from fans - a veritable hoarder’s paradise. Each cherished by Michael as a token of love for him. 

And he needs that now more than ever.

***

When I was sixteen, I boarded a coach, upon which I sat for thirty hours, before disembarking in Prague in the Czech Republic. As a painfully shy teenager, I wasn’t confident enough to be forthright enough to make friends on the journey, so the trip was undertaken alone. Besides, I wasn’t travelling to make friends. I was going to see Michael. I hadn’t seen him for four years, since that soul-altering night on the
Dangerous
tour. I was nauseous with excitement.

It was so cold. But I was determined to get a position close to the front of the following day’s concert, so, after being stood a short while at the feet of the specially erected Stalin-esque
HIStory
statue - staring up at it, both bewildered and awestruck - I left the coach party. After mindlessly navigating the streets of the alien city for a number of hours, I eventually managed to stumble across the stadium, Letna Park; where I joined a throng of similarly single-minded diehards who were also gathering to queue overnight before the concert. But it was so cold.

The concert happened. I had managed to hold my own in the downright dangerous race to the front, once the gates finally opened. And - devoid of food and sleep - had also, somehow, managed to stay vertical all day, in spite of the intermittent tidal surges created by the momentum transfer of one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand people (the largest live crowd Michael ever performed to) standing behind me.

As well as when we all jumped and joined along together in singing, “Tom Sneddon is a cold man.”

I filled my pockets with the confetti that had burst from cannons signalling the end of the show, then – very, very slowly – shuffled my way to a merchandise tent. My understanding of the Czech currency was limited at best, and my adrenaline was sky-high: a combination ripe for disaster. The kind of disaster where you find yourself lost and alone, at night, in the middle of a mid-nineties, recently Eastern Bloc capital city wearing the three Michael Jackson T-shirts you’ve just spent all your money on, whilst also clutching the tour programme as close to your torso as possible, in an attempt to achieve that extra microtherm of warmth.

I had a ticket with the name of the hotel I was supposed to be staying in, but I couldn’t pronounce its name, and the odd person that walked past who I summoned the courage to engage and show the ticket to, just shrugged at me and continued walking. After the roar of the concert, everything seemed more silent than was possible.

Penniless on the deserted streets of Prague, I sat down and cried. Then a car pulled up.

A woman wound down the window and garbled something in a foreign language, whilst gesturing for me to approach her. She was my only hope. I showed her the ticket. Again, a shrug and a look of confusion. My heart sank as I was hit with a genuine terror that I wasn’t going to be either home, warm, eating or sleeping any time soon. Then the woman, whose face had empathetically mirrored my own as it fell, suddenly pointed at my T-shirt (the top one, anyway), and simply said, “Michael!”, before directing me to take a seat in the back of the car, and beginning to drive around what came to seem like endless, dark, desolate city streets. Finally, she turned a corner, and I saw something I recognised. Illuminated like a homing beacon, in all its elucidated glory, stood the
HIStory
statue.

And at its feet, my ride home.

The closing words to Michael’s song ‘The Lost Children’ are uttered by his own children, and are of them recognising that it’s time to return home, as it’s getting dark.

As many of us do when we’re feeling lost, I simply had to return to Michael; to the light.

***

There is a photograph of me as an eleven-year-old boy, in which I am stood proudly in front of one of the walls of my bedroom. Behind me, each and every inch of the wall is plastered in pictures of Michael in various poses: most of them of him on stage wearing either the silver shirt from the
Bad
tour or the gold leotard from the
Dangerous
tour. Some of the pictures are huge, one of them is as small as a postage stamp (for those pesky spaces adjacent to light switches - I would have bought an entire magazine solely for that picture). The other walls, the ones not featured in the photograph, were adorned in the same way. As was the ceiling. My younger brother and I shared the bedroom, and one of our favourite things to do was agree to intermittently rearrange our pictures. It would take us entire weekends.

This photograph is over two decades old now. It is beginning to brown around the edges. My memories of those times are often played on Super 8 film. There is a yellow saturation to them, and its inhabitants move with a strange and erratic jerkiness; a dreamlike dance akin to how toddlers dart around. The photographs evoke a sense of nostalgia that invokes a spirit of eighties and early nineties summers; of hotplate patio flags and the riled ants that filed from the cracks between them; of music from a far off radio somehow managing to carry all the poignancy of a Muezzin’s call to prayer, as it infused thermal air currents with otherworldliness. Radios that would, naturally, have been playing Michael’s music.

No-one embodies the zeitgeist of those years better than Michael. I sometimes experience waves of Michael-specific nostalgia inspired by a mere scent or particular lighting. In an instant I can be stood in the queue waiting for the coach to take me to my first concert:
Dangerous
tour, Roundhay Park, Leeds, August 16th 1992. I was twelve.

Pre-Internet, we had pen pals that sent us cassettes and VHS tapes that were ultimately played to ruin. Cassettes containing
The Jacksons
album, with rarities such as ‘The Man’ or ‘Whatzupwitu’ tagged onto the end, to fill up the space. Our longplay version of
MTV
’s ‘Dangerous Diaries’ was our most prized possession. Those tapes contained a lot of soul. The Holy Grail was a
Victory
tour performance or
Bad
tour second leg concert on VHS. We finally received the latter in 2012 as part of the
Bad 25
anniversary package (with the Estate's profiteers even being kind enough to retain the same levels of quality control exhibited by those mail-order bootlegs from back in the day).

My Michael nostalgia begins in 1987. But imagine those fans that saw that unique star as it began to twinkle in that coruscant dusk of 1969 – then followed its celestial trajectory all the way through to the dark dawn of 2009? That’s a whole gamut of Michael zeitgeist.

The analogy of Michael’s lifetime being a nighttime is an interesting one. Michael always said that he was merely a conduit for the wishes of a higher being, such as how the moon is to the sun. The moon reflects light from the sun, which illuminates our darkness when the sun is not around, and in much the same way, Michael lit up the darker occasions of many of our lives. In turn, those that support and honour him, borrow light from him also.

There is a faction of fans that call themselves ‘Moonwalkers’. The original name for the dance-move now universally recognised as the ‘Moonwalk’, was the rather insipid, ‘backslide’. Michael premiered the move on
Motown 25
: the show, which - fittingly - fired him into the stratosphere and transformed him into the most luminous superstar the planet had ever seen. Michael’s sincere intent and corresponding actions in changing the world for the better began on that night, and continued for the remainder of his corporeal existence. It’s up to all fans - Moonwalkers
et al
- to help ensure this continues.

In the song ‘Cry’, the call-and-response between Michael and God illustrates Michael’s self-awareness of his mission perfectly: the closing words being Michael’s (or is it God’s?) instruction to “change the world”. Now Michael is gone, the call-and-response can even be interpreted as Michael talking to each and every one of his fans. Since Michael's death, to quote St. Teresa of Avila, his fans “…are the eyes with which he looks with compassion on this world”.
‘Cry’ has become the anthem for ‘World Cry Day’, marked by fans on 25 June - the anniversary of Michael’s passing.

***

There’s a system of belief in which the idea is promoted that human beings, in-between our earthly existences, gather together with all the souls we are bound to encounter in our next corporeal adventure. The night of August 28th, 1958 must have been quite the event.

The subsequent day, Katherine Jackson gave birth to her eighth child. Another boy. Her mother suggested she named him ‘Ronald’.  Katherine - thankfully - ignored that, and opted for ‘Michael’ - after the patron saint of soldiers. A name that means “Who is like God”.

Maybe at that pre-terrestrial meeting, Michael signed up for a corporeal life of sacrifice. That he courageously adopted the responsibility of being a messenger to attempt to guide humanity along a more peaceful path.

This theory is something of a consolation when recalling the quagmire of sufferance Michael’s life became. As an erudite human being brought up in a Christian household, it’s impossible to consider that parallels between himself and Jesus Christ did not occur to him. Indeed – again, much to his critical detriment – Michael actively marketed Christ’s message to a capitalist society through his performances of ‘Earth Song’ at the
Brits ’96
(recently voted the greatest
Brits
performance of all time)
and again later the same year at the
World Music Awards.

In the
HIStory
track ‘Tabloid Junkie’ Michael even sings, “…with your pen you torture men / You’d crucify the Lord.”

It is a travesty that the triumvirate of topics that people discuss regarding Michael does not automatically include his humanitarian efforts. Above all else, this should be the overarching one – the trinity that coalesces as one.

Love survives. It is forever. From the physical ecstasy married with the discovery of true love, to the spiritual repercussions found in a steadfast love that has matured, fortified and been vindicated by faith.

As Michael mused,

“Hope is such a beautiful word, but it often seems very fragile. Life is still being needlessly hurt and destroyed. Because I believe the answer to be faith; not hope.”

Yet, our stance on Michael’s message and his innocence is not about mere angles of moral perspective. It is about defending the reputation of an inordinately good man – in light of the facts, not faith.

***

The silent pilot light of achieving one’s aspirations flickers persistently throughout an entire lifetime, though the cynicism of society relentlessly attempts to extinguish the flame. This self-sabotaging phenomenon is fuelled by an ubiquitous misbelief amongst the embittered, of their having missed the opportunity to fulfil their own dreams. This byproduct of envy is not the fault of those afflicted, however: more a logical consequence of the inherent difficulty in leaping over the ego and reacquainting themselves with the indomitable optimism embodied by their inner child.

Fortunate people are blessed with having had faith instilled within themselves. This fortune is derived from the quality of being enlightened recipients of unconditional love and support. The peerless strength that comes with possessing an innate knowledge of being loved is what imbues the requisite confidence and courage vital for remaining stoic in actively advocating the validity of one’s intuited belief system, regardless of the bombardment of a sneering society.