What show business required, he had also learnt, was to give the fans what they wanted. If they demanded fantasies, he would provide them. (“The longer it takes them to discover [who I am], the more famous I will be.”) From the end of the 1980s he devised ever more headline-grabbing ventures: bidding for the bones of the Elephant Man, sleeping in an oxygen chamber, appearing in toyshops and galleries in garish wigs and moustaches. Dates were arranged with Tatum O’Neal and Brooke Shields to prove he was all man, rather than the shrinking virgin of his other public self. Two marriages were undertaken, three children vicariously produced.

Oddness overshadowed his real, hard-won achievements: world adulation for a black pop star, the birth of video celebrity, and millions of dollars given to black causes. If the press stayed on his weird story, he believed, his records would sell. The risk was that the weirdness would multiply until he was hardly human.

His last public appearance, before his death of apparent cardiac arrest, was to announce a series of 50 sold-out concerts in London. Hours before his death he was rehearsing for them, exuding joy, energy and sharp judgment. His glitter jackets, the tabloids claimed later, hid a body that was half-starved, subsisting on painkillers. Though he was worth $1.3 billion, said the Sun, he died with debts of $300m.

But he had sold 750m albums and, from Riga to Rio, children danced like him. In the words of his “Dirty Diana”,

... contd.