This, said Michael Jackson, is it. Standing on a velvet-draped stage at the O2 Arena three months ago, the singer announced his return to live performing. “This” turned out to be no fewer than 50 London concerts which were supposed to launch him back into pop’s premier league two weeks from now.

Over and over, above the screams of his fans, he kept shouting the same mantra: “This is it.” Even as I listened to him repeat himself between nervous, squeaky laughs, I knew it couldn’t be. In the flesh, Jackson looked tiny and weird, his face like sculpted putty. Shrunken and frail, he left the O2 stage after only five minutes. Gingerly he descended a small set of steps at the back, hanging on to the handrail for dear life. How could this shell of a man recapture the electrifying energy that had made him the world’s greatest pop star? His proposed comeback was the stuff of fantasy.

The hundreds of fans who had waited for hours in the cold outside to witness his much delayed arrival had no such doubts, however. For them his announcement represented a second coming and a chance, at last, to see the king of pop in concert. Millions of ticket applications flooded the promoter’s website in the course of the next hour.

Like their 50-year-old idol, a large number of the fans gave the impression of occupying a parallel reality. The allegations of child abuse that had followed Jackson since 1993; the fact that he had made no music of unimpeachable merit since his record-breaking Thriller album in 1982; the sense that he lived life by a separate moral and financial code; none of these details seemed to cool the fans’ ardour. They shouted, ululated and wept in so deranged a manner that I feared for their sanity. Jackson beamed back, flashing his victory sign and raising a clenched fist — a gesture at odds with his emaciated frame.

Superficially, he got back into some sort of shape. The technicians who saw Jackson rehearse in Los Angeles last Wednesday evening say he put on a terrific performance; but next day he was dead. His body couldn’t cope. Brian Oxman, the Jackson family’s lawyer, last Friday — the day after the singer’s death — made it plain thathe had been using too much pain-killing medication.

“This is not something that has been unexpected . . . because of the medications which Michael was under,” Oxman said. “I do not know the extent of the medications he was taking but the reports we had been receiving in the family is that they were extensive. When you warn people this is what’s going to happen and then it happens . . . where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Oxman understood. The real message that day at the O2 was not “this is it” but “that’s that” — it was all over. It certainly is now. Death has spared Jackson the shame of cancelling the concerts and facing the bankruptcy that would have followed.

The most poignant photographs republished since he died are those that show him shortly after he first became a star and those that capture him in the last years of his life.

The diminutive round-cheeked little boy, surrounded by his much bigger brothers, looks angelic. But he also looks lost and apprehensive. The pinched, powdered and surgically brutalised face caught by the police camera following his arrest on child abuse charges in 2003 is not just grotesque but tragic, too. His eyes show a shamed soul in a state of torment: the once mighty, unassailable king of pop, his throne mortgaged to the banks, the police taking his fingerprints, the media baying for his blood.

In the coming weeks, months and years, his body will be picked over as thoroughly as his estate. Out of the woodwork will come the opportunists and backstabbers. In rare but disturbing cases, someone will have a true story to tell. We will very likely wince anew while his songs lose a little more of their lustre, their three or four minutes of pop perfection taking on associative baggage they should never have been required to bear.

Promoters, creditors, chancers and crooks will grapple with the financial consequences of his death. Claim and counter-claim will be lodged. But a fortune once so bloated by royalties and tour revenues that Jackson was able to buy the Beatles’ song catalogue for $47.5m (£37m in 1985) has dwindled to almost nothing.

All the years of success and sacrifice of songs as sublime as any that have ever been recorded, of singing that could break your heart or make it leap with joy: what did they add up to? How will we remember him — as a genius hounded to death? As a scheming pervert? Or simply as a divine oddball?

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