There 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.

Expert View

Before he insisted on calling himself the King of Pop, he really was the King of Pop

Pete Paphides

• More

• Post a comment

Times Archive 1972 The Jackson Five live at Wembley

Michael Jackson's twinkling feet scarcely seemed to touch the stage

Related Links

• The Times obituary: Michael Jackson

• Jackson dies of heart attack aged 50

• Michael Jackson in grand finale curtain-raiser

Multimedia

• PICTURES: highlights of Michael Jackson's career

• PICTURES: decline and fall

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.

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010