Your beautifully presented memories have given me (a very peely-wally – it means pale – white boy from Scotland) the vital beginnings of an insight into how American negroes perceived Michael Jackson – which is information I’ve never quite had access to.

If I’m honest, my first thoughts on the Jackson Five were fairly negative – although I did find Michael too cute to dislike.

See, by the time they appeared I was a dyed in the wool psychedelic music lover heading towards Krautrock but with a soft spot for Jackson Browne-like sensitive singer-songwriters. Pop was beneath me and The Jackson Five seemed like a manufactured, watered down substitute for the ‘proper’ soul I’d grown up with (Ray Charles) courtesy of my parents, and the Motown/Stax singles I danced to as a teenager in clubs in Edinburgh.

I put them on a level with The Osmonds and largely ignored them both.

Even when Michael went solo, I didn’t really get it, although I admired the mechanics and the dynamics of the songs.

It was, as has been so often the case in my life, my children who really made me listen to him. They were young enough to adore Thriller without having any preconceptions and that made me listen to him, and then re-discover the back catalogue and keep track of his later work.

Just about the exact opposite of the curve you followed, I suppose.

Ultimately, what I came to love about him was that fact that behind the superlative showbiz and razzmatazz that he served up there was often a not so hidden subtext. Songs like Black Or White, Billy Jean, Man In The Mirror, Earth Song and so on, dealt with aspects of the human condition – our frailty, our stupidity, our vanity and our common bonds – that I suspect a great many young people in that blighted Reaganite/Thatcherite era might never have heard about if they weren’t in his songs.

The drivel that was routinely served up to us – certainly in the UK – by mainstream radio in the 80s, was largely devoid of content. Duran Duran typified the vacancy of the whole scene.

I can’t pretend to have devoured all of Michael Jackson’s albums track by track, or scoured them for deep insights into life, but I was aware that he – at the peak of his popularity – was taking chances with his lyrics and experimenting with his music when it would have been much easier just to coast on his established style and sound. That’s what most spectacularly successful artists do. It almost seems inevitable. But he didn’t.

It’s impossible not to wish there were a few more like him.