michael jackson

765. ‘Blood on the Dance Floor’, by Michael Jackson

/ UK #1s blog / 6 Comments

And so Michael Jackson ends a twenty-year run of chart-toppers, with another of 1997’s curios…

Blood on the Dance Floor, by Michael Jackson (his 7th and final solo #1)

1 week, from 27th April – 4th May 1997

Throughout his career, it hasn’t been the MJ classics that have made #1. The Jacksons’ only made it there with ‘Show You the Way to Go’. Solo-wise, ‘One Day in Your Life’, ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’, and ‘You Are Not Alone’ all made it, while ‘Bad’, ‘Beat It’, and ‘Smooth Criminal’ fell by the wayside. Only ‘Billie Jean’, and maybe ‘Black or White’, came close to popular ubiquity.

So what of his final #1? Well, at least it’s not a syrupy ballad, or one of his God-complex blockbusters. Actually, it’s much more reminiscent of his heyday. It isn’t up there quality-wise, but there are flashes. The bridge and chorus, the growl in his voice, and the dangerous woman in the lyrics, all feel very ‘Bad’-era. We can add Suzie (Suzie’s got your number, Suzie ain’t your friend…) to Billie Jean and Dirty Diana in Jackson’s list of ladies best avoided. Interestingly, some sources claimed that ‘Suzie’ was a metaphor for AIDS – giving a horrific double meaning to the line Look who took you under with seven inches in… – but Jackson denied it.

Elsewhere, the New Jack Swing production sounds quite dated, and away from the chorus he barely sings. The verses are a series of vocal tics strung together; sounding more like dolphins communicating, and just as indecipherable. When you learn that it was written originally back in 1991, during sessions for the ‘Dangerous’ album, the sound makes sense. The song was dusted off and tarted up ahead of Jackson’s remix album ‘HIStory in the Mix’.

In some ways, this is an underwhelming way for MJ to bow out. But then, several of his six other solo #1s have been underwhelming. And actually, compared to some of his nineties hits, this is a decent, if dated, dance tune with a fairly killer, funky beat. It was his 36th UK Top 10 hit, since his solo debut in 1972, and he still had a few more to come.

In fact, since his death he has featured on big hits with Akon, Justin Timberlake, and Drake, and so you wouldn’t count against him adding to his total in the years to come. Quite why records featuring Michael Jackson are still allowed to flourish while those featuring the man who preceded ‘Blood on the Dance Floor’ at number one – R. Kelly – have been buried in quicklime is a discussion for another day… Is it as simple as one having a court conviction? Or does musical snobbery come into play…? And I’ll end with an equally pressing question: am I the only person who just now realised that ‘dance floor’ is not one word…?

731. ‘Earth Song’, by Michael Jackson

/ UK #1s blog / 9 Comments

You can approach this next number one very cynically, if that’s your thing, as there’s lots to be cynical about…

Earth Song, by Michael Jackson (his 6th of seven #1s)

6 weeks, from 3rd December 1995 – 14th January 1996

For his sixth solo UK chart-topper, the King of Pop, long-since divorced from reality, fully realises his Messianic potential. What about elephants? he demands of us, towards the end of this colossal track. Have we lost their trust? Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker certainly let us know what he thought, famously mooning Jackson’s performance of the song at the Brit Awards.

But, once your eyes have completed their rolling, and you stop to listen to ‘Earth Song’, then you can’t help but be impressed. You might not want to hear it every day, but the very fact that he conceived of, wrote, and recorded this track, and then managed to sell the message in a way that only Michael Jackson could – largely through the conviction in his whoops and hollers – is darned impressive. Like ‘You Are Not Alone’, this is a lullaby underneath all the dressing (Jackson intended it to be simple, so that it could be understood right across the world). But what dressing… When the drums and funky bass kick in it’s a bit of a moment, as is the gigantic key change. The last three minutes is basically MJ berating us about the state of the planet, accompanied by a wind machine and a gospel choir.

And, let’s be honest, much of what he’s singing about is true. It was true in 1995, and it’s true thirty years on. What about children dying?…Can’t you hear them cry?… Where did we go wrong?… Someone tell me why… It’s preachy, sure, but he ain’t wrong. Of course, though, sending this song to number one is a lot easier than actually changing our ways, and if Jackson truly thought this would make any difference to the fate of the human race then he was Wacko indeed.

The video too is every bit as OTT as you might expect. I can remember watching it on ‘Top of the Pops’ at the time, aged almost ten, and being captivated. Watching back now, it’s painted in very broad strokes, but it’s vivid, and memorable. Dead elephants, felled trees, someone clubbing a seal… Then through his sheer bloody star power, clinging to some tree stumps, Jackson undoes all the damage, and we live happily ever after.

At the end of the day, most people are more Jarvis Cocker than they are Michael Jackson. And most of the time, that is a good thing. ‘Earth Song’ is preposterous, and overblown, and now interestingly forgotten among his illustrious back catalogue. But it also delivers an uncomfortable truth, however clumsily the message is conveyed.

This was the 1995 Christmas #1, famously holding off The Beatles’ much feted ‘comeback’ single ‘Free As a Bird’ (they’ll manage their 18th chart-topper, eventually). It also wraps up a very odd, very underwhelming year, in which the charts have felt at odds with what people were actually listening to. One interesting thing, though, to chart geeks like me, is that 1995 was the year where singles suddenly started entering at #1. What was once a freak event, marking an act out as the very biggest in the land, was happening much more often. From ‘Back for Good’ to ‘Earth Song’, all but two #1s were held-back, heavily promoted songs that entered at the top. This will continue as the nineties progress, with the turnover of number ones increasing all the time as well.

726. ‘You Are Not Alone’, by Michael Jackson

/ UK #1s blog / 7 Comments

And so we arrive at yet another staging-post on the long, but thinly spread, chart-topping career of Michael Jackson. One number one with his brothers, and seven solo, stretched out over two decades. Interestingly, and perhaps aptly, he only ever made #1 in odd numbered years…

You Are Not Alone, by Michael Jackson (his 5th of seven #1s)

2 weeks, from 3rd – 17th September 1995

’77, ’81, ’83, ’87, ’91 and now 1995. And this is just what we’ve been missing on our 1995 bingo card. After all the dance, the Britpop and the power balladry, what we really needed was some slow and syrupy, mid-nineties R&B. This sound was (thankfully) much more prevalent on the Billboard charts, possibly the sound of US pop at the time, and few acts would have had the star power to drag this sludge to the top spot in the UK.

Trust MJ, though. It was the second single from the ‘HIStory’ album, following ‘Scream’, the duet with sister Janet, more famous for its record-breakingly expensive video. And there is a sweet simplicity to this song. The chorus plays almost like a lullaby: You are not alone, I am here with you, Though you’re far away, I am here to stay… Like a lullaby in that it’s pretty, and in that it may send you to sleep.

Jackson puts in a pretty strong vocal performance as well, limiting the ticks and the gulps that have marked most of his music since ‘Bad’ (there’s not a single ‘eeeh hee’ either). He gives the lungs a workout towards the end, post key-change, reminding us that underneath it all he was always a fine singer.

And yet… Watch the video, and it’s easy to become distracted from the actual song. He is now fully white, and very plastic-looking. We’re almost treated to a full-frontal from the King of Pop, as he smooches with then wife Lisa Marie Presley, wrapped only in a towel. It’s all pretty icky. Of course, knowing what we know now means that any Jacko love song comes with its own in-built ick-factor. (‘You Are Not Alone’ was also written by R Kelly, just in case we needed any extra ickiness.)

So, in summary, this is a sweet enough, well-performed ballad, your enjoyment of which depends on how much you can block out thoughts of what we know now, and of a near-naked MJ canoodling with Elvis’s daughter. 1995 will actually turn out to be Jackson’s most successful year, in terms of chart-toppers. He still has a massive Christmas #1 to come, in which he puts his clothes back on and returns to his usual preposterous, overblown nonsense.

670. ‘Black or White’, by Michael Jackson

/ UK #1s blog / 18 Comments

This next number one carries a lot of baggage: involving the singer, the video, the theme of the song… So much that it’s easy to forget that it’s actually quite a breezy pop tune, built around an actually quite cool riff. Compared to Michael Jackson’s big ‘80s hits – ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Bad’, ‘Smooth Criminal’ – it’s a lot more ‘pop’.

Black or White, by Michael Jackson (his 4th of seven #1s)

2 weeks, from 17th November – 1st December 1991

It’s also a very modern sounding song, moving from said pop, to rock, to rap, with a tribal drumbeat laid underneath, with effortless ease. By the middle of the decade it will be common for pop songs to incorporate a rapped verse, but this is one of the first chart-topping examples I can think of. The huge change in tone for the middle-eight sticks out like a sore thumb, but also somehow works too, and is our first glimpse into how this is more than just a nice pop song.

I ain’t scared of no sheets, I ain’t scared of nobody… Jackson spits (‘sheets’ referring to the white cloths of the KKK), and the rest of the song’s lyrics are similarly hard-hitting. Don’t tell me you agree with me, When I saw you kicking dirt in my eye… he sings, as the main riff kicks back in again. But the true classic line is kept for the rap: I’ve seen the bright getting duller, I’m not gonna spend my life bein’ a colour…

This being Michael Jackson, though, the message that it don’t matter if you’re black or white comes with a little extra baggage. Compared to the MJ that we saw in the video to his last UK #1 – 1987’s ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’ – he looks a lot less… black. His nose, too, has changed beyond recognition. It would turn out to be a combination of plastic surgery, vitiligo and skin bleaching. In releasing a song called ‘Black or White’, you have to either marvel at Jackson’s confidence, knowing that he was going to invite comment and criticism, or suspect that he was becoming divorced from reality.

Still, he was the biggest pop star on the planet, and the music video premiered to the biggest audience ever. Like many of Jackson’s videos, it’s an eleven-minute piece of cinema. It opens in a suburban kid’s bedroom (the kid being child star du jour Macauley Culkin), before taking us on a tour of the world, as MJ dances with African tribesmen, Native Americans, Thai dancers and Cossacks before ending up on top of the Statue of Liberty. Nowadays you might label it as well-intentioned but clumsy. The most affecting part of the video is the simplest: the face shifting sequence, in which white men morph into black women into Asian men into white women.

The song ends, but the video continues with a five minute long scene where Jackson morphs into a panther, then embarks on a vandalism rampage, smashing shop windows and car windscreens. He got criticism for this, and cut it from later screenings of the video. (Personally, I’d criticise it for being self-indulgent and pointless, rather than encouraging violence…) Years later he edited this section of the video so that he was smashing windows that had been spray painted with racist slogans to better explain his actions. Oh, yeah, and then the video actually ends by cutting to an episode of ‘The Simpsons’, in which Bart has just watched the video to Homer’s annoyance (handily harking back to Jackson’s alleged other #1 from earlier in the year).

It’s a complex beast, then, this single. On the one hand a breezy tune with a positive message, on the other a sign that the King of Pop might have been living up to the ‘Wacko’ nicknames. It was the lead single from ‘Dangerous’, his last truly great album (though one that still probably couldn’t quite live up to its 1980s predecessors). Despite that, the 1990s would end up being Jackson’s most successful decade of all for number one singles, with three more to come… And I’m going to spoil things by saying that ‘Black or White’ is probably the best.

660. ‘Do the Bartman’, by The Simpsons

/ UK #1s blog / 5 Comments

As with all novelty singles, I approach this next number one with trepidation, my finger hovering reluctantly over the play button. But the intro actually sounds quite cool: a new jack swing beat and a squelchy bassline. Something by Janet Jackson perhaps, or a Prince ‘B’-side…

Do the Bartman, by The Simpsons (their 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 10th February – 3rd March 1991

The only version available on Spotify is the five minute (!) album version – from ‘The Simpsons Sing the Blues’ LP – so I don’t know for how long this intro did its funky thing on the single-edit. Eventually Homer comes in, yelling at Bart for some unspecified misdemeanour. Nobody saw me… I didn’t do it…

From here on things follow a fairly formulaic hip-hop single format: i.e. rapper tells us how great he is. Except here the rapper is a yellow cartoon boy, voiced by a thirty-five year woman (kudos to Nancy Cartwright here, as it can’t be easy rapping while putting on such a voice). There are some fun lines: I’m the kid that made delinquency an art, Last name Simpson, First name Bart… but the song ends up caught between not being funny enough to work as a novelty, yet still being gimmicky enough to annoy. The ‘joke’ wears especially thin on the, it bears repeating, five minutes long extended album version.

The fact that this does almost work as a pop song is probably down to the alleged involvement of Michael Jackson. He’s not credited – his label insisted he couldn’t be – and there are differing accounts of what he actually contributed towards the song, but it seems he wrote some of the lyrics and contributed backing vocals, as well as giving the song its title. He also apparently insisted that he be name-checked (If you can do the Bart, You’re bad like Michael Jackson…) Jackson would also feature in an episode of The Simpsons a few months after this had been a hit single. The video too is a six-minute long MJ-esque epic, in which Bart takes over a school talent show with his new dance routine (or was it all a dream…?)

It’s credited to ‘The Simpsons’, but it’s largely just Bart. Lisa gets a saxophone solo, and Homer gets to yell throughout. Marge and Maggie are conspicuous by their absence. I wonder if, to many British listeners, ‘Do the Bartman’ was their first exposure to ‘The Simpsons’. At the time this was released, the show was just halfway through its second season in the US, and was only broadcast on satellite TV in the UK (I remember it coming to terrestrial TV, on Channel 4, much later in the mid-nineties). If so, the song’s success is quite remarkable, as I’m not sure it holds much enjoyment for someone who’s never seen the show.

Anyway, in this moment ‘The Simpsons’ was on the verge of becoming the biggest TV programme in the world. Between series three and ten it was untouchable, and a fixture in my own house every dinner time. They even managed a second Top 10 single, another hip-hop track (and actually much better than this) ‘Deep, Deep Trouble’. After that, the show came to a natural conclusion in the early 2000s, and is remembered as one of the best series ever, and as a lesson in how to go out on top. Right? No…?

596. ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’, by Michael Jackson with Siedah Garrett

/ UK #1s blog / 13 Comments

It would make a good pub quiz question: what was Michael Jackson’s only UK #1 single to be released from ‘Bad’…

I Just Can’t Stop Loving You, by Michael Jackson (his 3rd of seven #1s) with Siedah Garrett

2 weeks, from 9th – 23rd August 1987

For it wasn’t ‘Smooth Criminal’, ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’, or the title track. It was this smoocher. And why was this the lead single from his first album in five years…? Who would listen and think, yes, this is the one to launch the most anticipated album of the year? Sure, whatever single they chose would probably have topped the charts; but that makes it all the more frustrating that the other, better songs missed out…

Anyway. We haven’t even got onto the music and I’ve made my feelings pretty clear. It’s not a terrible song, but it’s proper syrupy, glossy, eighties lite-soul. The intro, with its tinkly percussion, sounds like the love-theme from a Disney film. Like it should be sung by an animated teacup, or a doe-eyed princess; not the world’s biggest pop star. Whispers at morning, Our love is dawning… Heaven’s glad you came… And then there’s the fact that I can’t help feeling a bit icky hearing Jackson croon a love song, knowing what we know now… (The album version is even worse, opening as it does with MJ whispering I just wanna lay next to you for a while… and I just want to touch you…)

Much better were he whooping and squealing his way through ‘Bad’… Who’s bad? You Michael, we know that now. At least the chorus here has a bit of beef to it. My life ain’t worth living, If I can’t be with you… Boom… It doesn’t completely redeem the song, but it offers a glimpse as to why it was seen as a potential lead single.

It’s quite easy to miss the fact that this is a duet, as Siedah Garrett has a very similar voice to Jackson. Apparently he wanted Whitney Houston or Barbra Streisand, but both turned him down. Garrett was an interesting choice, as she had largely been a club singer and backing vocalist (though she did co-write ‘Man in the Mirror’) and her biggest hit prior to this had peaked at #45. Still, she sings it well, though I do think a duet is more effective with two more differing voices.

Compared to his last chart-topper, ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’ feels like the beginning of MJ Part II. The vocal tics, breaths and whoops are much more pronounced, and his voice feels softer and higher (though that might just be because he’s signing such a syrupy ballad). Meanwhile, I never noticed before how white he looks on the ‘Bad’ album cover, compared to ‘Thriller’.

In the US, this made number one, along with the four following songs from ‘Bad’, a record that’s since been matched but never beaten. In total he released a ridiculous nine of the ten tracks from the album as singles, and while they’d give him six more UK Top 10s none of them would make it to the top. Next time we’ll meet Michael Jackson it will be with the lead single from his next album. He’ll have gone from ‘Bad’ to ‘Dangerous’, make of that what you will…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKBiYBWRYDM
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548. ‘We Are the World’, by USA for Africa

/ UK #1s blog / 25 Comments

You wait thirty-odd years for a charity single, and then two come along in the space of four months…

We Are the World, by USA for Africa

2 weeks, from 14th – 28th April 1985

Trust the Americans, eh? They see a successful, popular original and, rather than just accept it, they have to remake it… Is ‘We Are the World’ to pop music what ‘The Office’ was to sitcoms, or ‘Ringu’ to horror movies? And in true American fashion, everything here is bigger than anything found on ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’: bigger production, bigger stars, a bigger song (literally… it’s over seven minutes long…)

Bigger, yes. But is it better? Well, no. From the minute the syrupy, faux-grandiose intro kicks in, you know what this is going to be. Seven long minutes of earnest, self-indulgent, do-gooding cheese. As with Band Aid, I try to identify as many voices as I can. Lionel Richie gets things underway, I can hear Stevie Wonder, and Kenny Rogers, and Michael Jackson on the chorus (he and Richie were the Geldof and Ure here in writing this behemoth, while Quincy Jones was on production duties). I can hear Diana Ross, and Cindi Lauper (who really goes for it). And Bob Dylan – this is the only time he’ll be appearing on a #1 single – and in true Bob Dylan fashion he sings his lines like your uncle obliviously singing along to something on his headphones… It’s true we make a better day, Just you and me… (it’s my personal highlight of the entire song, to be honest…)

I’m quite embarrassed by the voices I didn’t recognise, for this makes Band Aid look like a primary school assembly. George Michael? Bananarama? Pfft. They were clearly going for current acts, to attract the kids. USA for Africa is a ‘Who’s Who’ of American popular music, including Tina Turner, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Dionne Warwick, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles, all the Jacksons, Smokey Robinson, Bette Midler and Harry Belafonte (whose idea this whole thing was, after he’d seen the success of Band Aid) among many others. There was a sign above the studio asking these superstars to ‘check their egos at the door’, while Stevie Wonder joked that if the recording wasn’t finished in time he and the equally blind Ray Charles would be driving everyone home. And yet. None of these names, or this admirable attitude, manage to make this a particularly enjoyable listen…

For a start, what are they singing about? This was recorded for the same reason as Band Aid – to raise money for those starving through the famine in Ethiopia – but where ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ has so many memorable lines (for better or worse) this has very few. We are the world, We are the children… sticks with you, as does the soaring It’s a choice we’re making, We’re saving our own lives… (which is the best line, for me, musically). The rest just float past in a sea of glossy blandness. What they’re really missing, I think, is Status Quo…

Some people think charity records should get a free pass. That because they’re raising money they can be as crap as they want, and it’s our duty to buy them anyway. I disagree, and will not be holding back as I rip into charity singles on this countdown. Starting with this one. Just because it’s for a good cause doesn’t mean it shouldn’t try to be a good song. Plus, there’s always the uncomfortable sight of wildly rich recording artists – who could have donated a million dollars without blinking – caterwauling on about us all being a part of God’s great big family…

Still, despite it being a bloated fart of a record, ‘We Are the World’ actually ranks towards the higher end of the charity song scale. It was written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, after all. And, as someone who has lived in Asia for many years, I can confirm that this is a much more widely-known song than ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, largely thanks to the MJ-factor. Plus, this ‘We Are the World’ is for any time of year, not just Christmas… I was going to add that, unlike Band Aid, USA for Africa hadn’t been re-attempted. Except it turns out that it has been: in 2010, after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, featuring the likes of Justin Bieber and Kanye West, as well as Jackson’s original vocals. It made #2 in the US, but only #50 in the UK… There may well be a reason I’ve never knowingly heard it…

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516. ‘Billie Jean’, by Michael Jackson

/ UK #1s blog / 19 Comments

In my last post, on Kajagoogoo’s ‘Too Shy’ I announced it as the eighties-est moment yet. (I also quite liked the intro.) And here we have a ginormous smash hit that is even more ‘eighties’, from the biggest album of the decade, by the biggest star of the decade. (With another pretty cool intro.)

Billie Jean, by Michael Jackson (his 2nd of seven solo #1s)

1 week, 27th February – 6th March 1983

We won’t come across many songs more famous than ‘Billie Jean’ on this countdown. Everyone knows it, has danced to it, has sang along to it. We’re familiar with every ‘hee’ and every ‘hoo’. But it’s the sort of ultra-ubiquitous song that you don’t – or I don’t, at least – stop to pay attention to anymore. And what stands out now is how much there is going on. In my head, ‘Billie Jean’ is that bass riff and Jackson’s voice. But there’s a lot more than that.

There are strings, finger-clicks, a guitar, and about ten different synth lines and effects. It doesn’t feel cluttered, though. Everything is in its right place, where and when it needs to be. Even the vocal ad-libs feel planned and thought-out beforehand. You could argue that music this well-produced can come across as soulless, and you might have a point. But that would be a harsh criticism of an almost perfect pop song.

Billie Jean is not my lover, She’s just a girl who claims that I am the one… It’s a grown-up topic for a former child star. Billie Jean was an amalgam of the groupies who had thrown themselves at his older brothers in the Jackson 5. But the kid is not my son… And the singer of this record sounds like a different person to the boy from his first #1, ‘One Day in Your Life’ – a false start if ever there was one. This is the moonwalking, ‘hee-hee’-ing MJ, who has been parodied ever since. It’s also the first sign of a troubled Michael Jackson, in the ominous lyrics and the paranoid vocals. Of the fact that being world-famous since the age of ten might have made him a little… odd.

Since it’s the 1980s, and this is Michael Jackson, we also have to take the famous music video into the equation. Like the song as a whole, it’s a video I could picture without ever having watched in its entirety. My main take-aways… Jackson still looks very young (he was only twenty-four), there are more cats than I remembered, and it actually looks pretty dated in its slow-motion sequences and its graphics. It suits the song well, though, which isn’t something you can always say about Jackson’s later videos, where it felt like he was just throwing money at them rather than trying to tell a story.

Famously, ‘Billie Jean’ was one of the first songs by a black artist to get played on MTV. But that was only after the president of CBS records threatened to pull all the label’s other acts from the channel. You could spend a day lost down the rabbit-hole of ‘Billie Jean’ trivia. Producer Quincy Jones, for example, didn’t think it was strong enough to even be an album track. My favourite factoid, though? That someone suggested the song be called ‘Not My Lover’, lest people thought Jackson was singing about tennis legend Billie Jean King.

As is so often the case with the biggest stars, the UK singles charts never really played fair when it came to MJ’s imperial phase. ‘Billie Jean’ got a solitary week on top of the charts. While almost all the other singles taken from ‘Thriller’ –famously there were seven from the one album – were Top 10 hits, he only has one further #1 in this decade. But, despite not being the biggest-selling, or longest-lasting, number one ‘Billie Jean’ will probably outlive us all. Deep into the 21st century it is still regularly voted as ‘Best Pop/Dance/Eighties Song Ever’, while in 2021 it became the first music video from the 1980s to reach a billion YouTube views.

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481. ‘One Day in Your Life’, by Michael Jackson

/ UK #1s blog / 8 Comments

I wrote in the recap just gone that the eighties had officially begun, kicked off by none other than Shakin’ Stevens. But with all due respect to Shaky, up next we have perhaps the ultimate ‘80s pop icon.

One Day in Your Life, by Michael Jackson (his 1st of seven #1s)

2 weeks, 21st June – 5th July 1981

MJ has his first solo #1. But it’s not as simple as all that. ‘One Day in Your Life’ is hardly one of his signature tunes. In fact, it’s two years older than the chart-topper he managed with his brothers in 1977: ‘Show You the Way to Go’. The Michael Jackson of 1981 was coming off the success of ‘Off the Wall’, poised, only a year away from ‘Thriller’ and world domination. But here we are.

He was just sixteen when this was recorded, in 1974, and he still sounds very young, caught between the high-pitched little kid from ‘I Want You Back’ and the megastar that recorded ‘Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough’. And it’s nice to be reminded that Jackson could actually sing – there’s no sign here of the vocal tics and squeals that make up his later hits.

It’s a song about longing, and waiting. He’s waiting for the day when his ex wakes up and realises what she’s lost: One day in your life, You’ll remember a place, Someone touching your face… And it’s a glossy, beautifully produced, slow-dance number, a good companion to the Smokey Robinson record that it knocked off the top. Like ‘Being With You’, it’s a record that reveals itself slowly. I was underwhelmed and a little bored with it at first – and it does sound dated compared to what was in the charts at this time, and compared to what Jackson was recording – but it’s a really nice song. I can’t help hearing it in a female voice, though: Dionne Warwick maybe, or Dusty…

Just call my name, And I’ll be there… I wonder if that’s a deliberate allusion to his group’s earlier hit of the same name. There are similarities between this and ‘I’ll Be There’ (they’re both ballads, for a start): this is a grown-up sequel, more teenage angst than childish optimism. Why was ‘One Day in Your Life’ a hit six years after its recording, though? It was released as the lead single from a hits compilation, and perhaps a combination of his ‘Off the Wall’ hits and The Jacksons’ second wind with disco hits like ‘Can You Feel It’ and ‘Blame It On the Boogie’ helped. It was the year’s 6th biggest selling hit, but it feels almost forgotten now, overshadowed by his monster smashes from later in the decade.

My favourite fact about Michael Jackson’s chart-career is that he only ever reached #1 in odd-numbered years (all his solo #1s, his Jacksons’ #1, even ‘We Are the World’… ’77, ’81, ’83, ’85, ’87 and so on…) It’s probably fitting, as there have been few pop stars as ‘odd’ as Jackson. Listening to this song, it’s so easy to forget the more uncomfortable side of his legacy. Probably because the teenager singing on this record was, to all intents and purposes, a completely different person to the Wacko Jacko of Bubbles the chimp, Neverland, his ‘sleepovers’, and beyond…