I was at Jackson’s last-ever UK appearance — the press conference to launch his residency at the 02 centre. Indeed, by the time he came on stage, I was ten feet away from him — standing in a scrum of screaming fans and tense, scribbling journalists. Ninety minutes late in appearing, Jackson had already worked the room into an insecure frenzy — 7,000 people who were starting to believe that of course Michael Jackson wasn’t going to appear in this freezing, incongruously unglamourous hallway at the 02 centre with a Starbucks opposite. He doesn’t do SE22. He’s Michael Jackson.

So when he did finally appear on stage — waving awkwardly, oddly disengaged — it was almost alarming. The crowd surged and screamed — mothers pushing children forward, shrieking “Michael!”, as if offering them to Jackson — while I stood, staring at arguably the most famous person in the world without a nuclear capability. The three most famous residences in the world are, after all, the Vatican, the White House and Neverland.

“His appearance is shocking,” I wrote, at the time. “He looks absolutely surreal. In profile, his nose has a sharp, skull-like point, and his cheekbones protrude like child’s elbows. His hair is a black lacquered curtain, and aviator shades cover fully half his face. In 2009, what you get from a personal appearance for Michael Jackson is his nose, mouth and little else.”

His face was paper-pale — as if he’d been caught in the blitzkrieg of flashbulbs so often that it had finally bleached him white. And of course, in a way, they had. For, mask-faced and frail, he looked as if the onerous task of being “Michael Jackson” had exhausted him. That absurd, escalating, pharaoh-like existence of his later life — with the chimps and the gold statues and the Presley wife and the veiled children — had finally left him too weary to sing, or dance, or write another Thriller.

When he walked on stage, I involuntarily said “Oh!”

It was the same sound I made when I heard that he’d died. Put simply, three months ago the news that he was alive was as shocking as the news that he had died.

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