The day Jacko played Poole (From Bournemouth Echo)

The day Jacko played Poole

7:10pm Friday 26th June 2009 in

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THE call came on a Friday and the marketing manager of the then Poole Arts Centre simply didn’t believe it. It was 1979 and the voice on the other end was asking him if he’d like The Jackson 5 to perform on Sunday.

It had to be a hoax. Several calls later the penny dropped, he took up the offer and although he couldn’t have known at the time, he had just booked the future King of Pop because Michael Jackson was about to go solo.

Stage doorman Tony Burns remembers it like it was yesterday. “We could have filled the place three times over.” He treasures his memories of the evening, when one of the brothers ambled down to his cubby hole and asked if he could use the phone to make a transatlantic call. In the flesh Michael Jackson was “polite and friendly. We shared a cup of coffee and a chat. He was good-looking, about five foot nine, a little shy but very nice with it.”

Tony got Jackson’s autograph and remembers how kind he and his brothers were to one teenaged fan who managed to get in to see them. The contrast between the person he met then and the man Jackson became was acute, he says. “You almost couldn’t believe it.”

Jackson made another visit to the area in 1981, to Beaulieu to visit Lord Montagu. He was accompanied, bizarrely, by the entertainer Liberace.

In the 1980s, the stories about him centred more on his alleged eccentricities; lying in an oxygen chamber, chatting to Bubbles his pet chimp, buying and furnishing in bling and carney style, a mansion called Neverland.

As Jackson got bigger, so did the stories. His plastic surgery operations told their own tale and the rumours that he was trying to change his skin colour from black to white persisted until his death.

The spending, the wheelchairs, the masks, the masks on his three children whose parentage remains uncertain provided endless tabloid fodder. But it was the allegations of child abuse that propelled him into more searing scrutiny.

He made the first allegations go away by paying money. But the second wave saw him in Los Angeles Courthouse in 2005, answering charges that he molested 12-year-old Gavin Arvizo.

Jackson was acquitted but his career never really recovered.

Bournemouth glazier Nick Woods, a lifelong Jackson fan, did not believe the allegations but “I don’t believe Jackson helped himself, either,” he says.

A collector of Jackson’s music, Nick says: “I think that’s the strangest thing to get your head round; there’ll be no more music, we won’t ever hear anything new from him again.”

He has travelled to Germany and Amsterdam to see Jackson in concert. “I went once with the fan club and they were just crazy for him,” he remembers. “They sang all the way there and when they arrived, most of them didn’t bother to even get their bags out of the coach, they just ran off and stood outside the hotel where he was staying. Me and the driver had to unload in the end.”

Nick travelled to Las Vegas for the recent Neverland fire sale. But he won’t be going to America for the funeral.

“For me it’s about the music and the man. His attraction lay in the dancing and the singing and the showmanship.”

According to Dr Richard Berger, from Bournemouth University’s Media School, this is the reason for Jackson’s success.

“He was unparalleled as a performer and what people may not know is how involved he was in his own performances. He used the American Werewolf In London director John Landis to direct the Thriller video which he wrote as a little story. He used Martin Scorsese to direct his Bad video.”

Dr Berger believes there were three phases in Jackson’s life and it is for the first two, as a Motown performer and a global sensation, that he will be eventually remembered.

“His music has already shot to the top if iTunes. Like Elvis before him, it’s quite possible that in death, Michael Jackson will simply get bigger.”