Michael Jackson has died. Even as I write that I find a lump in my throat chokes me and forces me to stare at those words in disbelief, wishing that they simply weren’t true. The world seemed an emptier place yesterday morning and seemed to have given way to a kind of subdued silence, something was missing and the world knew it. Sadly I have already spied the vultures circling, the crass idiots who don’t let up for a moments reflection or a passing nod at dignity. But I count myself amongst the millions who want to celebrate his life, the joy he has given and lament his passing with genuine sadness for what has been lost, as such I want to share a little bit of why this incredible man was special to me.

I was a child of the 80’s and as a child of the 80’s it would have been extremely difficult to not know who Michael Jackson was, he was the whole world back then. Thriller was released in 1982, I don’t remember this, all I remember is the copy we had recorded from my cousin's vinyl, the quality was atrocious and degraded with every play and it was played almost every day. We really couldn’t afford to buy the album so whenever I went to my cousin’s house I pawed the cover and read all the lyrics, I put it on the turntable and sat and watched it rotate, amazed at the clarity of the sound. The Thriller video wasn’t released until the very end of 1983 and the vast majority of my generation will relate the same story of being allowed to stay up late and watch the video when it aired for the first time. I can’t begin to describe the anticipation of this event, it was huge, it was positively the biggest, most exciting thing that could happen and being so young the video both scared and exhilarated me. You didn’t walk away from that night without being a Michael Jackson fan.

It’s hard to believe that it was 5 years before the next album came out, it’s even harder to believe that the man who dominated the 80’s only released two albums in that decade. So, it’s 1987 and something amazing is about to happen, the Bad album is about to be released, it’s a frenzy, it’s probably about the most exciting thing that could possibly ever happen in the entire history of everything in the world – Michael Jackson is releasing a new album. I’d just entered high school and with high school came pocket money, the week it was released I saved all my dinner money and pocket money so that I could buy it at the end of the week. It was Friday and I finished school, rushed home then went with my mother to buy Bad. I picked up that empty sleeve barely able to contain myself, took it to the counter and waited for the lady to slide the record in, bag it up and hand it back. I couldn’t get home fast enough, I couldn’t play it loud enough or too much, the only sound that could be heard from our house for weeks on end at that time was songs from the Bad album. The saving continued and I finally got my own copies of Thriller and Off The Wall along with Jackson 5 albums The Jacksons and Janet Jackson, I bought the 12 inches from the Bad album as they came out and when Leave Me Alone was released as a single I was ecstatic, up until then it was only available as a bonus track on the CD and we didn’t have a CD Player!

In 1988 Moonwalker was released and my friends Mum took us to see it at the cinema. Michael Jackson was my first big crush, seriously you should have seen my bedroom, huge posters, little posters and photo spreads collected from magazines, little pictures cut out from newspapers, I even had (actually still have) the ET poster, there was not a single millimetre of wall space that wasn’t covered with Michael Jackson. So, imagine if you will the absolute glee of little me sitting down in the cinema to see him on such a big screen in stereo, it was amazing and I think I may have sat there with a smile plastered across my face for the entire film. When the Mr Big sequence starts you see Michael leave his house dressed in a black pin-stripe suit with a black fedora and a beautiful white coat draped around his shoulders, he pauses on the steps for a moment and looks up to see a shooting star and I remember thinking that he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. My friend and I returned many times to the cinema to watch Moonwalker and every time we stayed to the very end of the credits when you see Michael wink in slow motion, I think we may have convinced ourselves that that wink was meant specifically for us!

Michael Jackson was the common bond between my best friend and me, in fact it was the reason we had become friends in the first place, a shared love for all things Michael. We used to spend hours practicing the dance routines and we knew the Thriller routine off by heart. She had a little red walkman and a set of portable speakers and we would practice in the quiet corner of the playground, in her back garden and on occasion in the sports hall, this was the best place because you could really get your Moonwalk down to perfection on the shiny surface. The Moonwalk had to be finished by an almost imperceptible jump onto your toes, my friend and I became so good at this that we could walk a fair distance on the very tips of our toes in nothing but socks (I’m now lead to believe this is quite bad for your feet!) You could also do the circular Moonwalk and spin and up onto your toes, all pretty bloody impressive but never done half as well as Michael. We also knew the Bad and Smooth Criminal routines down to facial expressions and hand gestures. We bought the Moonwalk book together on the Saturday of the week it was released, we told each other about every magazine or magazine article we found, we sang the songs together and we did nothing but discuss just how amazing Michael Jackson was. We planned to run away to Neverland on more than one occasion, we talked about how good it would be to be there, about how much fun it would be with the fairground and the zoo and Michael. I used to write him letters that I never sent anywhere all with the belief that he would understand me because, aside from my actual real life best friend, Michael was my best friend in the world and I know that sounds kind of silly, but that was how it felt.

I never expected this moment, never even contemplated a day when the world would be without Michael Jackson, even now as it has become a reality it is incredibly difficult to comprehend. I wouldn’t have expected the passing of someone I’ve never met to hit me so much but so far I’ve been unable to sit through a single news broadcast without ending up in tears and I’m buying newspapers unable to read them. I’m amazed and overjoyed at the things I’ve seen in the past two days, the tributes from fans the world over is such an incredible outpouring of love and celebration that it only serves to remind just how many lives he touched. When the news started to filter through that he was in hospital, that he’d died it was reported that you could hear Michael Jackson being played in damn near every car and across every continent, it makes me smile to think that for one simultaneous moment the entire world echoed with the sound of his music. Almost every music channel has Michael on a loop, radio stations are playing at least one song an hour and his death remains head line news.

Yesterday I played Off The Wall and it was the first time it didn’t cheer me up, yesterday it only served to remind me what had been lost, what we have all lost. Today is a little different, today it reminded me of what we had, of the incredible and amazing talent we were privileged to witness. I’ve been listening to and watching a lot of Michael in the last few months, I finally bought CD versions of all my vinyl and loaded it to the iPod so he’s been portable and somewhat excessively played of late. I can honestly say that reliving it all has left me more awestruck than I ever was as a child, his ability to stand alone on a huge stage in front of an audience of thousands of people and absolutely hold your attention was truly astounding. One man alone in a spotlight with the power of a God.

I hope in some small way that I’ve managed to convey at least a little of the joy that Michael Jackson brought to my life to whoever reads this. I didn’t have the most straightforward of childhoods and whilst I would never describe it as being particularly unhappy, I can say with honesty that it was not exactly happy either. However, my memories of listening to, eating and breathing Michael Jackson are a strange and beautiful exception to this. There is a time in my life when I would have walked the length of the world for this man, I would have trapped sunbeams in a jar and caught a falling star just for him, what’s more important however is the fact that Michael Jackson made things like that seem possible.

Michael, in all truth and with all of my heart I miss you and thank you with everything I have for the memories you gave me.

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[link] Arguably the first moment you truly see the legend and of course, the Moonwalk

[link] This performance blows my mind. 12 years after the Motown Billie Jean performance, look at how effortless the Moonwalk has become.