Will Michael Jackson survive his concert marathon?
As his fortune ebbs away, Michael Jackson is relaunching his pop career with a 50-date residency at London’s 02 arena. Thanks to record ticket sales, he could be moonwalking to fiscal salvation. But can the middle-aged comeback kid survive this musical marathon? By Robert Sandall
Robert SandallThere are two sharply opposed views of Michael Jackson’s forthcoming 50-concert marathon at London’s O2 arena. On one side is the unshakable optimism of the fans, who snapped up 800,000 tickets within five hours of their going on sale in March. The Jackson faithful — now nearly double the throng who paid to see him here in his 1988 heyday, when he sold out a mere seven shows at Wembley Stadium — have voted, overwhelmingly, with their wallets. They clearly believe that after more than a decade battling legal, financial and health problems, the self-styled “King of Pop” is poised to make a triumphant comeback.
On the other side is the sincere belief of some of Jackson’s former business associates that he will bottle it. Even before the reports that Jackson may be suffering from the early stages of skin cancer and the news that the first four dates of the tour are to be postponed, scepticism was rife. One top British manager who spent time in 2007 attending meetings called by Jackson, then cancelled at the last minute, says: “Let’s see how many concerts he turns up for.” This is amplified by one of the army of legal representatives Jackson has hired and fired over the past decade. “He’s a serial betrayer of business deals. He’ll probably play a couple of shows, then get a doctor’s sick note. Jackson’s not a well man. To do 50 concerts you need real strength, mentally and physically. He couldn’t even read the teleprompter at the press conference.”
It is true that his brief appearance at the O2 to announce his residency didn’t entirely settle the question as to how fit for purpose the 50-year-old Jackson is. There was something unconvincing, or at least un-Michael, about the way he punched the air and kept repeating “This is it!” in a voice a full octave lower than the girlish whisper he normally employs in public. The unfamiliar macho posturing, combined with what looked like a wider mouth, chunkier nose and larger hands than those last seen on a concert stage in 1997, led some commentators to speculate that the guy on the podium at the O2 wasn’t Jackson at all.
“We know that never looking like the same guy twice is part of his unpredictable genius,” one wrote, “but is there surgery which actually stretches your mouth from peephole to letterbox? And what about the huge, spindly hands?” With news filtering back from LA that Jackson’s show director, Kenny Ortega, had been auditioning lookalikes to appear in some of the ensemble dance routines “to prevent Michael from getting strained”, the notion that one of these stand-ins had been flown to London for the press conference didn’t sound so far-fetched.
Randy Phillips, CEO of the concert promoters Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), who also own the O2 arena, laughs this off. The silver-haired fixer and former manager of Rod Stewart who brokered the deal to put Jackson back on stage — or “to put Humpty back together again”, as one wag suggested — has heard plenty of “wacko Jacko” stuff. Phillips recalls how he was dining with Jackson in LA last year when a Google alert signalled that British tabloids were running with a story that his dinner companion was wasting away from a flesh-eating disease. “Michael is a magnet for weird stories like that! He’s in fine shape. Very sharp, asks succinct questions. When we first started talking he was a little thin maybe. Today he feels much healthier.”
There is a reason for this. Jackson’s finances are much healthier now than they have been for a long time — as Phillips, whose company has collected more than £50m from the sale of the O2 tickets, is aware. He won’t say how much of the advance box office has been paid to Jackson, but chuckles as he quotes a lawyerly aphorism: “It isn’t about the money, it’s all about the money!”
Well, quite. But there have been dark mutterings in the business pages about the difficulty of insuring the O2 concerts with a notorious no-show like Jackson. Marcel Avram, a German concert promoter, won a multi-million-dollar judgment against the singer at a 2005 civil trial in California for damages arising out of Jackson’s no-show for some millennium concerts. As usual, Phillips is sanguine. “Michael is totally focused now, and the insurance wasn’t a problem, it was just expensive.”
He reveals a phased three-year touring plan that will take Jackson to Europe, then the Far East, winding up in the Americas in 2011. He estimates that Jackson will make $50m-$100m from the London dates, and that this could rise to $500m if the world tour materialises. When Phillips approached Jackson in 2007 with his offer of 10 dates at the O2, he knew Jackson was broke. Everybody did. Headlines blared that Jackson was struggling to refinance a $270m debt borrowed against his main asset, a 400,000-song catalogue, including the entire Lennon-McCartney oeuvre, which he had jointly owned with Sony since 1995. Rumours suggested that Sony was about to assume control of all of it. More unserviced debts had reportedly forced him to surrender the keys to Neverland to a private-equity group, Colony Capital, which basically bought his mortgage.
It was a very different story when Phillips first met Jackson in 1993, while negotiating on his behalf an endorsement deal with the fashionable trainer brand LA Gear. In those days, the King of Pop ruled. He had recently signed a new contract with his label Sony that was reputedly worth $100m, making it the richest record deal in history. He had outbid Paul McCartney for the publishing rights to the Beatles songs — which meant every time one of their tunes was played or performed in public, he received half the royalty. He had acquired a 2,700-acre ranch with a funfair and zoo attached, which was later valued at $100m and which he named Neverland after the fictional nirvana of Peter Pan.
Thanks to the soaraway success of 1982’s Thriller, still the biggest-selling album of all time, Jackson had been described as “a one-man rescue team for the music business”. He has sold more than 100m albums in his solo career, for which he was receiving the unprecedentedly high royalty of $2 per disc throughout the 1990s and the early years of this century. His tours were the biggest earners on the planet. In 1993, Jackson’s Dangerous jaunt was on course to gross $200m — another record — when a civil lawsuit brought by the parents of his 13-year-old sleepover pal Jordy Chandler changed everything.
The $22m that Jackson paid to settle the Chandler case out of court inaugurated a darker phase in his life. He retreated to Neverland, only venturing forth, it seemed, for more cosmetic surgery or skin-whitening treatments. He started living beyond his means. Where the money went isn’t clear, though the $6m binge in a single store, recorded in Martin Bashir’s 2003 TV documentary, suggested retail therapy on an imperial scale played its part, as did the $6.5m he paid his wife from 1996 to 1999, Debbie Rowe, to renounce her conjugal rights to their children, Prince, now 12, and Paris, 11. One source who had access to Jackson’s accounts reckons that over the previous 20 years he had burnt through $1 billion: $650m in earnings and the rest borrowed.
By spring 2005, when he was in court facing charges of sexual misbehaviour with another of his teenage friends, Gavin Arvizo — in a trial whose saturation TV coverage rivalled that of the OJ Simpson murder case — Jackson’s affairs were in a parlous state. He hadn’t performed live for nearly a decade and he hadn’t released any new songs since the Invincible album in 2001, which bombed. He had fallen out badly with his record company, whose former head recalled that Jackson was “always coming in and asking for money. His biggest problem is he doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘no’ ”. Because he wasn’t prepared to sack any of the 94 employees on the Neverland payroll, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pay his household bills, disaffected staffers were now starting to sell stories about the strange goings-on at Jackson’s fantasy hide-out. The lawyers who had worked for him on the Arvizo case were pursuing him for $2.2m in fees.
It was hardly surprising when Jackson claimed in court that he was addicted to anti-stress medications and painkillers. It made sense too that, after his acquittal in June 2005, for the next four years he should disappear from public view. There were still 47 other suits in progress, mostly claims for payment by bankrupted merchandise suppliers, though two related to further, unreported allegations of child abuse. As well as his hefty mortgages, he was carrying $36m of unsecured personal debt.
According to one of Jackson’s legal representatives who, in the absence of a manager, had to deal with these issues at the time, “He was in complete denial of financial reality. If you tried to tell him he had to sell any of his assets he would have a screaming fit. Meanwhile, skeletons just kept falling out of the closet. Michael would carry on denying everything to your face until you showed him an affidavit.”
In the summer of 2005, when Jackson shuttered Neverland and decamped to Bahrain at the invitation of Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the 33-year-old second son of the Gulf island’s king, he seemed to be making a clean break. Two years later, Abdullah joined the long queue of litigants who had entered into what they understood to be a business arrangement, only to learn that Jackson didn’t quite see it that way. The sheikh was an occasional songwriter who had, as a teenager, become friendly with Michael’s brother Jermaine. He believed that his new production company, Two Seas, could rescue Jackson’s career. The deal he was proposing encompassed a new album, a ghosted autobiography and a stage musical in the style of the Abba vehicle, Mamma Mia! Abdullah’s main idea, according to a friend who describes him as “totally honourable”, a “his-word-is-his-bond type of guy”, was “to enhance Michael’s profile and finances without him having to do anything much in public”. There was another side project he hoped Jackson might go for: a charity single in aid of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, written by himself.
By the time the case reached the High Court in London in November 2008 — where a financial settlement was reached just before Jackson took the stand — the sheikh’s business motives were hotly disputed. According to the defence, Abdullah was a fawning wannabe, an amateur intent on smuggling his own material onto the next Michael Jackson album. The money spent paying off some of his debts — the Arvizo legal bill, and $35,000 for unpaid utilities at Neverland — was, Jackson insisted, “a gift”.
Over the coming year, the court learnt, there were more gifts, to a value of $7m, as the sheikh bankrolled Jackson’s lifestyle in the Bahraini capital, Manama. Along with giving him with $500,000 spending money and $350,000 for a holiday to Europe, he paid for Jackson’s eight bodyguards — more security than the king employs in a country where crime is almost nonexistent. “I saw the payments as an investment in Michael’s potential,” the sheikh said in a statement read out by his lawyer in court. “He said he’d pay me back… through our work together.”
The sheikh did much besides to smooth Jackson’s reception on a quiet island smaller than Middlesex with a population of 700,000. He helped to broker a deal with a local property development company, AAJ Holdings, which loaned Jackson a palatial villa in exchange for a “consultancy”. He fended off the objections of a leading conservative Muslim cleric who branded Jackson “effeminate” and an unwelcome emissary of “the iniquities of Las Vegas”. He endured the embarrassment of an incident in November 2005 in which Jackson was spotted re-applying his make-up in the ladies’ toilet of a Dubai shopping mall. In the ensuing melee, a woman who had photographed the scene on her mobile phone was manhandled by Jackson’s bodyguards before being apprehended by the police. “Michael Jackson might be a big name but that does not give him the right to go into a ladies’ washroom,” the woman protested. Two months later, Jackson was in trouble again when identified in Islamic drag in a shoe shop, his black, all-enveloping woman’s abaya betrayed by his size-10 men’s shoes. “That’s when I guessed it must be Michael Jackson,” the sales assistant told the Dubai daily Khaleej Times.
By May 2006, with no discernible progress on any of the Two Seas projects and another $2m wasted on an abortive foray to London to get Jackson to record something, anything, the sheikh’s patience was wearing out. Jackson’s initial response was to deny having signed any agreement with Two Seas — despite the published photographs of the signing ceremony — and to leave Bahrain for Japan, briefly, and then Ireland. Guy Holmes, the British music executive flown in to manage Two Seas, said later: “Michael’s an extraordinarily intelligent man, but sadly, his moral health is far worse than one could imagine.” Others go further. “Jackson tells barefaced lies without any regard for the consequences,” says his former legal representative.
“At times it can be like dealing with a sociopath.”
All agree, though, that Jackson is anything but the basket case he sometimes appears. The loss of his all-expenses-paid lifestyle in the Gulf acted as a wake-up call. With one more heavyweight creditor, the sheikh, on the warpath, and expensive judgments against him piling up, generating cash flow became his priority. After receiving a fat fee for hosting an awards show in Japan, Jackson moved to the west of Ireland, where his privacy was unlikely to be disturbed and his tax liabilities would be minimal. He stayed first at Castlehyde in Cork with his friend, the dancer Michael Flatley, with whom he shared a criminal lawyer, Bert Fields. Fields had successfully helped Flatley to countersue a woman who had falsely accused him of rape in a Las Vegas hotel in 2003, and had previously represented Jackson in the Jordy Chandler case.
For the next six months, Jackson worked harder than he had for years. At Grouse Lodge recording studio in Westmeath he prepared new tracks for a 25th-anniversary reissue of his 1982 magnum opus, Thriller, with the R&B star Will.i.am. He phoned the British impresario Simon Fuller, sometime manager of the Spice Girls and creator of the US talent show American Idol, to talk over ideas for a comeback. His most high-profile public appearance as an entertainer in this century came when he performed at the World Music Awards in London in November 2006. On Christmas Eve that year, Jackson relocated to Las Vegas, “a great place to call home”, as he told the local paper, which noted that “his handshake and voice were strong and firm”. According to one source who attended meetings with Jackson over the coming months, “The penny had definitely dropped… that he would only now make any serious money out of some kind of live performance.”
But what kind? With CD sales plummeting and ticket sales through the roof, a return to the concert arena was the obvious way of servicing his debts. A Las Vegas residency similar to the one undertaken by Celine Dion was widely rumoured to be on the cards after Jackson was spotted in cahoots at the Wynn hotel with the award-winning director Kenny Ortega, who had worked on his live shows in the 1990s. “We’re talking business and looking at lots of different possibilities,” Ortega commented enigmatically.
At this point the possibilities that really appealed to Jackson were the ones that excused him from the onerous responsibilities of performing live. Randy Phillips of AEG, who made his first approach to Jackson in early 2007, was turned down flat. Much more attractive then was Simon Fuller’s idea of converting Jackson into a “virtual online presence” — a brand, maybe in the cartoon style of Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz. A Fuller aide recalls many Vegas planning meetings in which Jackson spoke glowingly of the local Cirque de Soleil production of the Beatles’ hits, Love. After a parting group hug that the aide recalls as “a rather bony experience”, Jackson and his entourage — now down to one bodyguard and his youngest child, Blanket — would return home to their $60m, 100,000 sq ft Spanish-style palace, kindly loaned by another exotic royal, Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei. Here, all ideas of relaunching Jackson into cyberspace stalled because, according to Fuller’s aide, “there wasn’t enough money in it upfront
As 2008 rolled around, Michael Jackson accepted the inevitable: there was no alternative to a live comeback. The anniversary rerelease of Thriller was selling well by modern standards, but 3m copies worldwide was chicken feed compared with the 50m the album sold in its first incarnation. He had managed to hang onto Neverland and his half of the ATV song catalogue, but only by making some very specific promises to the new debt guarantors, Colony Capital. When Jackson’s new spokesman, the Colony partner Tohme R Tohme, informed the media that the King of Pop would be moving back to LA with his three children to be closer to “where all the action is”, talks with the LA-based concert promoters AEG had reopened. But when Tohme boldly added that “the second half of Michael’s career will be better than the first”, nobody at Colony or at AEG — and quite possibly not the artist himself — realised just how badly Michael Jackson had been missed.
The big unanswered question about Jackson’s comeback won’t be resolved until he’s played his 50 O2 shows — or pulled out of them. Is he up to it? Like much else in Jackson’s tangled life, the evidence is contradictory. In November last year, Jackson’s lawyer, Robert Englehart, gave as a reason for his client’s non-attendance at the London sheikh case: “It would be unwise for him to travel, given what he’s got now.” Englehart refused to elaborate on “what he’s got now” and the sheikh’s team countered with the tart observation: “It’s not the first time a sick note has been presented by Mr Jackson.”
But Jackson’s health is more than a matter for legal bickering. The latest skin-cancer scare may have been connected to the many public sightings over the past two years of Jackson being pushed around in a wheelchair clutching a parasol, like a slightly mad geriatric. The Fuller aide who met him in Las Vegas described him as looking “grey”, and illness is the reason Jackson has normally given for not turning up to meetings. As his 51st birthday looms, he is about to embark on a series of 100-minute performances that, if they are to live up to their all-singing, all-dancing predecessors, would tire a much younger man.
The optimists point to the fact that the Jackson who turned up for the O2 press conference in March looked considerably sturdier than he has so far this century. Technicians working on the show rehearsals in LA report that he is full of energy and ideas, and always on time. One who met him at his rented mansion in Bel Air, a French chateau-styled spread furnished entirely in gold, found him “much fitter than expected and very on-the-ball”.
A more troublesome unknown might be his mental state, which looked fragile as he refused to follow his teleprompt script at the press conference. “I don’t know if that was stage fright,” Randy Phillips says. “He was a little reticent maybe, but that was more him being out of practice.” His confidence was boosted, according to Phillips, by the ovation he received from the cast and audience of Oliver! when he entered his box at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on the Saturday following the press conference. “Whatever insecurities he might have had evaporated right there.”
Phillips’s main worry has been how to keep Jackson away “from all these characters I have to fend off from his past”. He won’t name them, and you hope they don’t include more litigious parents. One is almost certainly Jackson’s former spokesperson, the American PR Raymone Bain, who served during his spell in Bahrain. Claiming to have instigated the AEG deal, Bain is now reportedly suing Jackson for $44m. Phillips says he has built “a protective wall to stop people getting to him the way they used to”. Jackson has tried to reconvene what he calls “the old team” — that is, his collaborators from the glory days of the 1980s. Frank DiLeo, his former manager, who, according to Phillips, “has a real good way of dealing with Michael”, is back on board. His original producer, Quincy Jones, however, declined to help Jackson with new recordings and has reportedly warned others to “be careful” when dealing with him.
However things turn out, Phillips insists, these concerts will probably not mark the end of Jackson’s career as a performer. Calling the show “This Is It” was not so much Jackson’s way of signalling farewell, Phillips says, but more a thanks-for-waiting. “When I asked him why he was doing this tour now, he said it was because his kids are old enough to appreciate it and he still felt young enough to do it. He’s told me that whatever profit he makes from these shows will go into a trust fund for his children.”
Profits, however, are still some way off. AEG expects to see no return on its investment of at least £20m until Jackson has played one-third of the O2 shows. The start-up costs for This Is It have been huge, covering the biggest stage set built for an indoor arena show and a number of what Phillips calls “grand illusions”. His hope, along with that of the 800,000-odd fans who have bought tickets, must be that their trust in pop’s most charismatic but accident-prone Peter Pan doesn’t turn out to be the grandest illusion of all.
