Michael Jackson in Cardiff: 5 August 1992

Desmond Clifford

Cardiff’s old national stadium was a cheerless concrete bowl which performers struggled to fill with atmosphere.

I once left Bono to it after half an hour or so, figuring I could still get home in time for Men Behaving Badly and rescue my evening.

The national rugby team fared no better.

I was there the wet November night in 1993 when Canada beat Wales for the first time ever, viewed as a national calamity at the time.

On the night Michael Jackson played, Kris Kross, a barely teenage hip-hop duo best remembered for “Jump”, and styling their jeans back-to-front, were charming and did their best to warm up the crowd.

Alas and predictably, early stardom did them no good either and Chris Kelly eventually died of an overdose.

Cold

August in Cardiff can be like October.

The sun had gone, it was cold and intermittent rain swept the stadium – no roof in those days.

MJ finally appears from an explosion of light.  He stands frozen.

He wears aviators and a metallic top held in place by a golden cod piece.

Shards of light fall on him.

He is a statue.

Holding silence is a challenge for an actor and not everyone can pull it off.  MJ is perfectly still for what must be a full minute, 70,000 eyes on him alone.

He turns his head a fraction.

After perhaps one and a half minutes he slowly peels off his sunglasses.

Delirium. Not a note yet played, he captivates this massive crowd.

That’s entertainment.

Strangeness

It’s hard to exaggerate just how famous Michael Jackson was in the 1990s.

His reputation is now so soiled, his work so veiled by unease, that he emerges today only fleetingly into public consciousness, and more often than not for his strangeness than his music.

If not quite silenced, his work has been pushed into the shadows, not-quite-cancelled but uncelebrated, a netherworld of curious ambiguity.

Yet when he played Cardiff, MJ was the most famous man on earth.

MJ’s descent is hard to date precisely and was masked for a time by his incredible abilities.

By the age of seven he had probably spent as much time singing and dancing as Mozart had sat at the piano.

His father spied a fortune in his talented children and schooled them relentlessly.

MJ’s ability and charisma propelled him beyond all others and, in the most transient of industries, he remained relevant in five decades.

By 1992, the child of “Ben” and “One Bad Apple” was long gone and a haunted, brilliant man possessed Cardiff’s stage.

Hammy

The “Thriller” video seems tame and hammy now but in 1983 it was deemed so shocking it premiered late at night on Channel 4 and was prefixed by a warning of its diabolic content.

A happy-go-lucky Michael transforms into a werewolf while the dead rise from their tombs to dance and commune with him.

MJ-as-werewolf then terrorises his girlfriend, who isn’t in on the spell, nor the dancing, and whose sole function is to run and provide the fear.  Her name was Ola Ray.

I watched that late night screening in my flat in Aberystwyth in 1983.

It was genuinely scary.  The video carried a postscript from MJ saying it doesn’t reflect his personal beliefs and citing creative expression.

But too late: the sorcerer had performed his ministry.

MJ no longer knew himself.

His hair, his face and his skin colour all changed.

He created a fantasy world called Neverland and was surrounded by sycophants, money-grabbers and mercenary medics.  His whim was his way and disaster incubated around him.

Is it fanciful to think that “Thriller”, or at least its material consequences, did in fact change his life in some diabolical and unlooked-for way?

King of Pop

Arguably, MJ was the first truly global star.

Neither Elvis nor the Beatles penetrated significantly into Russia, China or Africa in their time.

The lifting of the iron curtain and the arrival of satellite media was perfectly timed for MJ.

He was everywhere, the authentic star of the video age.  Statues of him were erected across the planet.

He journeyed from child prodigy to King of Pop. Only Elvis had previously worn the King’s crown and the title lifted MJ from the common orbit.

“Thriller” sold a million a month and it remains the best-selling album of all time, a record unlikely to be broken because of the way we now consume music.

Dance is difficult to write about; its whole purpose is to substitute movement for what cannot be articulated.

As a species we’ve been doing this since our ancestors stood upright.

Every culture in every part of the world and in every age has a version of dance.

People do it in the kitchen when there’s no one looking; I know I’m not alone. It’s just in us.

MJ was the greatest exponent of this oldest and most universal of creative human activities.

It’s unnecessary in the age of YouTube to describe MJ’s dance innovations: the moonwalk, the crotch grab, the zombie, the toe-stand, the anti-gravity lean, the robot.

MJ was a machine; a Pratt and Whitney engine is not more precise.

There was assurance, rhythm, and absolute confidence in what he did.

His performance was remote and coldly brilliant. No one danced along with MJ; you watched. This was his field of genius, and he was Mozart. The greatest performer on the planet.

The abuse allegations which now so firmly attach to Michael Jackson first surfaced around the time of his performance in Cardiff.

A year later he reached a massive settlement out of court with the family of Jordan Chandler.

A decade after that he stood trial in California on charges involving other boys but was acquitted on all counts.

Posthumously further allegations emerged and hover now over his reputation.

Dangerous

MJ never played Cardiff again.  A couple of months later he cancelled the remainder of his Dangerous tour.

His life sank into legal chaos with mental and physical health issues. The painkiller addiction which eventually killed him began at this time.

You can watch early film of the uncorrupted boy performer and weep for the dislocations which lay ahead.

MJ was himself abused physically, emotionally and financially. His childhood was stolen.

As an adult – was he ever truly adult? – he was increasingly detached from any form of ordinary life. He was uncritically adored. He claimed Elizabeth Taylor for his best friend.

His favourite companion was a chimp named Bubbles (happily, still alive today and living at a sanctuary in Florida).

He married Elvis’s daughter; of course he did, but this too was doomed.

At his trial MJ cut a pitiful figure.

The world’s greatest dancer seemed barely able to walk. Whether this was in part psychosomatic or confected is impossible to know.

His autopsy revealed the presence of arthritis, perhaps unsurprisingly.

At any rate, the dancing urge never left him. Driven by a need to rebuild his finances MJ signed up for an unprecedented residency in London in 2009.

Only a couple of weeks out from this, he died, pop’s most shocking death since Elvis.

In pop, no man since MJ has been called King.

The documentary “This Is It” records the rehearsals for his last dance.

Like a declining Olympian, he was no longer at peak but still a machine driven by muscle memory.

And one final, posthumous record: “This Is It” was the highest-grossing documentary film ever, much good it did for MJ.

In Cardiff, in August 1992, it rained and MJ had to step off stage for a while; you can’t do what he did on a wet surface.

Eventually the rain lifted, and MJ danced again.

At the show’s end MJ climbed into a spacesuit at the front of the stage. As the outro played the astronaut lifted off in his powered jet suit, the first time this technology was seen in Wales.

He flew off over the wall into Westgate St.

Needless to say, it wasn’t MJ. Once inside the suit he descended through a trapdoor and a stuntman took his place.

But the illusion was preserved.  One way or another, MJ had left the building.

I was there that night and saw genius at work.

No greater entertainer, no stranger man, ever appeared on a Welsh stage.