Cameron McMenemy 1st Mar 2018
| | ReviewThe Observer - Sunday July 17, 1988
A principal boy in total control
by John Peel
The last time I saw Michael Jackson at Wembley, he was a diminutive fifth of the Jackson 5, cute and precocious. On Thursday he returned as superhero, larger and appearing stranger than life, with a show I do not expect to see equalled in my lifetime.
The evening paper had a story of spivs selling tickets for the Jackson show at £150 a time. The dispirited scousers I spoke to outside told an altogether different tale. Ruin, I gathered, stared them in the face. Repressing the urge to press coppers into their hands, I continued the yomp in from beyond the extended wheel-clamp/tow-away zone, having left the racer in an area which only a year or so ago was probably all sylvan glades and babbling brooks alive with carp.
Once installed in Section 80 with the £5 tour programme and a packet of plain crisps, I settled back in anticipation of a feast of fun. All about me citizens were peering at the empty stage through cardboard opera glasses bearing the "Bad" logo, while others attached "Bad" balloons to their clothing. Below us the huddled masses cheered each time the Michael Jackson Pepsi advertisement appeared on the screens at the side of the stage.
At six o'clock, we cheered as technicians took their places. Five minutes later we enjoyed the first of few Mexican waves. An hour later Radio 1's Gary Davies appeared to ask whether we were ready to boogie before urging a big Wembley welcome for Kim Wilde.
I felt a bit sorry for Kim. Very much the bread roll with which we toy absent-mindedly while awaiting the meal, she had yet, as the tabloids had emphasised with their usual quiet persistence, to meet Michael Jackson. But there she was, waving a red scarf and bending over a lot so that the cameras could catch the cleavage. 'It's great to be here,' she said. After a song or two a discussion developed in our row about the catering staff, who were dealing out the lager and cold dogs in what seemed to be Motherwell colours. We reached no important conclusions.
In the interval we amused ourselves by leaping up from time to time to gawp at celebrities arriving in the glass-fronted banqueting suite. We liked Frank Bruno the best. But suddenly there was thunderous music from the stage, a battery of lights blazed out over the audience and there, scarcely believably, was Michael Jackson.
'How ya doin,' he asked after a couple of hits. Well, I was as fine as anyone with sore feet standing in a cold, damp football stadium could be - but how was Michael? From close-ups on the twin screens, he did not look too good. The famous remodelled face glowed faintly inhuman beneath a surfeit of rouge - and his performance to date had been curiously uninvolving, despite our overfamiliarity with it from a host of videos.
But Michael Jackson clearly needs a few minutes to get into gear and as the costume changes came and went and the stage and lighting effects grew more audacious, he took control with a performance of matchless virtuosity. Making much of stagecraft learned, surely, from James Brown - especially a device whereby a song apparently finished, with the star seemingly in emotional crisis, frozen save for lips moving as though in prayer, would be reprised - Jackson led his dancers, singers and musicians, all fearsomely well-drilled and rakishly handsome, through less a sequence of songs, more a series of scenes, the whole resembling some futuristic, technological pantomime, with Michael Jackson himself a distillation of all principal boys, singing some of the world's best known songs and dancing with such authority, timing and energy that the odd action replay would not have come amiss.
My only wish is that my children could have been there to see this stupendous performance. It is something they would never have forgotten.
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