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Born in the American industrial town of Gary, Indiana on August 29th, 1958, Michael Jackson was the seventh of nine children born to father Joe and mother Katherine. It was the former who would have the most influence upon Michael's life, inducting him at the age of five into the Jackson Brothers, a family band managed by Joe and comprised of his children. Originally Michael played the conga drums, but his genius for dancing and singing quickly came to the fore and Joe appointed him the group's lead vocalist at the age of eight, changing their name to The Jackson Five and taking them off on tour around the black clubs of a still-segregated American Midwest where they often opened for striptease acts.

By all accounts, Joe was a bully, a strict disciplinarian who conducted group rehearsals under the threat of physical violence; threats that, as Michael and Joe himself would later confirm to the media, were often carried out.

"If you didn't do it the right way, he would tear you up - really get you" Michael told British journalist Martin Bashir in the 2003 TV documentary Living With Michael Jackson.

One night while Michael was sleeping, the story goes that Joe - or ‘Joseph', as he forced his children to address him - climbed into his son's bedroom through an open window with a mask on and began screaming and shouting. This was Joe's way of teaching his children not to leave their windows open at night. For years after Michael would suffer from insomnia, too scared to sleep.

It wasn't all bad, though - under the iron gaze of their father, The Jackson Five were picked up by the legendary Motown Records in 1968 and next year began a recording-breaking streak of single releases, "I Want You Back", "ABC", "The Love You Save" and "I'll Be There" all torpedoing the Billboard Hot 100 and going straight in at Number One.

The group stayed with Motown for seven fruitful years, before leaving for CBS where they were renamed The Jacksons for legal reasons. Michael, though, had already tasted solo success with a quartet of his own Motown albums and after overseeing such hits as "Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)" and "Can You Feel It" as lead songwriter with The Jacksons, teamed up with producer Quincy Jones - who he'd met on the set of 1978's "Wizard Of Oz" remake "The Wiz", his now inconceivably eerie film debut - to produce the seminal "Off The Wall".

The record proved to be a smash, and is regarded as the start of Jackson's ‘golden period', which saw him inventing the moonwalk, clearing the way for black artists to appear on MTV with the Carlos Santana-assisted "Beat It", winning countless awards and, on November 30th 1982, releasing the best selling album of all time; "Thriller"'s title track accompanied by a video often voted the greatest ever recorded.

From here on, things go down hill. Generally speaking, at least - there was still the success of 1987's "Bad" to look forward to, as well as the sell-out world tour that record spawned and his crowning as "The King of Pop" by actress Elizabeth Taylor at an awards show in 1989. But by this point Jackson had grown uncomfortable with his own appearance and increasingly eccentric - there were rumours that he'd started bleaching his skin as his face turned from brown to a ghostly white and underwent a series of structural changes attributed by observers to plastic surgery. There were pet chimpanzees, the Neverland Ranch and rumours that he slept in oxygen chambers and had purchased the bones of the Elephant Man. If Jackson wasn't already perceived as a man with a tenuous grip on both the real world and his own sanity, various accusations of child abuse from young visitors to his Neverland Ranch made sure he was. He was never found guilty of any wrongdoing, but the world was whispering.

Those whispers would continue throughout the nineties and the first decade of the 21st century and Jackson was troubled further by allegations of anti-semitism and near-constant financial problems caused by an absurd and extravagant frittering away of his fortune. Most unsettling of all, you imagine, were the accusations that he wasn't fit to look after his own children when he infamously dangled his son Prince Michael Jackson II (AKA Blanket) from a balcony on the fourth storey of a Berlin hotel. He later apologised for this "terrible mistake", but by now the weight of public opinion against him was seriously beginning to rival the acclaim fostered by his incredible back catalogue.

After a few more years of financial chaos and radio silence, it was announced that Michael Jackson would be returning and returning big, with a 50-show residency at London's O2 Arena, running from July 2009 ‘til March 2010. The tour was greeted deliriously and all the shows on what was billed as a farewell tour sold-out, before Michael bid the world the ultimate farewell on June 25, 2009; the ‘King Of Pop' found collapsed at home in his Bel-Air mansion. Medics fought for over an hour to revive him with CPR but their efforts were in vain and Michael Jackson, boy star turned haunted man, was pronounced dead by LA County Coroner Fred Correll at 2.26pm on a sun-drenched summer afternoon. Unfortunately for the music world, it was to be one of those days that stops the world in its tracks. No-one will ever forget where they were or what they were doing the day Michael Jackson died. And, whatever your own opinion of the man, the one thing beyond all and any doubt is his outrageous talent as a performer. What's harder to ascertain is where the performer ended and the human being began.