On a dark February night in 1984 hundreds of fans stood shivering in the cold outside New York city’s Metropolitan Museum of Natural History, hoping for a glimpse of one of the world’s most famous faces.

The occasion? The Guinness Book of Records had stopped their presses to include the new record holder for the biggest selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller

Jackson was the most successful recording artist of the last 30 years. He sold 750 albums worldwide.

During his extraordinary career, he released 13 No.1 singles and became one of a handful of artists to be inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

He won 13 Grammy Awards and received the American Music Award's Artist of the Century Award.

But the boy from Gary Indiana, who dazzled the world at age 11 when he belted out Rocket Robin with his four brothers, was a flawed genius, a troubled soul.

And if his life was extraordinary, it was equally bizarre.

He was the child star who grew up to become the adult who fought against the prospect of middle age by turning to prescription drugs and plastic surgery and closing himself off in the fantasy world of Neverland to all but the company of children.

Contrary to popular belief the Jackson 5 were not discovered by Diana Ross, with whom Jackson had a lifelong friendship, though Motown did engage the Supremes leading lady to introduce the boy band to the world.

The other famous woman who featured large in his life was Elizabeth Taylor whose looks he tried to emulate under the surgeon’s knife with sad and pathetic results.

Perhaps what forged that friendship was that he, like the celebrated actress, was one of the few truly great child stars who became even a bigger star in adulthood — albeit at times one marred by a tragic and whacko lifestyle.

A Peter Pan of Pop who became a king of sorts, much of Jackson’s early childhood, as the world was to learn, was beset by a physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his father. Joseph Jackson, a steelworker, had failed to make any indent as a guitarist in a band called The Falcons and so heaped upon his sons, young Michael in particular, his longed-for ambition for stardom.

His father, in his efforts to goadhim on to bigger and better things, told young Michael he was no good. That he was ugly. Little wonder then that he spent a large part of his 40s undergoing plastic surgery in what seemed at times a desperate, unrelenting urge to ‘scrub off’ his blackness.

But it was his very blackness that was to imbue him with a talent that was, quite simply, unique. Michael Jackson was a one-off.

If the early hits of this curly-headed boy, Rocket Robin and the syrupy but emotionally catchy Ben, had young girls screaming at their posters on bedroom walls, his multi-million selling albums of the Eighties, Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad gave us perfect pop songs — Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough, Rock With You, The Girl Is Mine, Beat It, Billie Jean, The Way You Make Me Feel.

His music defined a generation, the MTV generation. The epic Thriller video has yet to be beaten by any music video since. Jackson’s sound and style was to inspire future generations of artists, not least those who gave birth to hip-hop.

As a song and dance man he was up there with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Anyone fortunate enough to have seen him in Cork in 1988 will give testament to the truly marvellous movement and dexterity of his limbs.

But after that it was mostly a downhill journey for Michael Jackson. He was past his peak both critically and commercially and his remaining years were to be beset with health problems and an even more bizarre lifestyle.

It was all there paraded out before us — the first marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, followed by his marriage to Debbie Rowe, mother of two of his three children. Children he gave strange names to — Prince Michael, Paris Michael and Prince Michael 11 — and children kept hidden from the world by having them wear masks when in the public eye. And let’s not forget his one-time companion, Bubbles, the chimp.

But the most damaging blow to his career was the allegations of child abuse and, though he was never found guilty, the smear remained streaked across that strange, and changing, face.

How will be remembered? Undoubtedly, fans should brace themselves for new revelations, perhaps more extraordinary than anything that has gone before.

But nothing can detract from the fact that he belongs to a very select band of the now departed — we’ll all remember exactly where we were when we heard the news that Michael Jackson was dead.