Today Michael slipped quietly out of the side entrance, away from Mohammed Al Fayed's suite in a blue Mercedes just before 3p.m...
Something extraordinary and unprecedented happened late in the night of Sunday, 11th April. And it happened because of some frantic phone calls. Welcome to what will be, for the first and the only time, the full and exclusive story of the event that, like, totally rocked the fan world, man.
Sunday, 11th April was supposed to be, for me, a bit of a nightmare day. I had been staying at home with my parents and on Sunday I had to make the short journey back to university where my final ever Exam Term beckoned (aagghh). However, things didn’t quite turn out how I expected. My day was, how should I put it… disrupted somewhat. My day and the day of about 50 other people, as a matter of fact.
On Saturday, 10th April, I was lying on my bed chatting to a friend on the phone. I put it down and it rung again straight away. That usually means it’s Gloria. It was Gloria. Her words made me laugh out loud: “Michael’s supposed to be in London at a football match.” Yeah, right. But it was true. Michael was in London staying with Mohammed Al Fayed. Mr. Al Fayed owns Harrods, and showed Michael around the store. Michael paid particular attention to the store’s in-house harpist, asking her to play “Greensleeves” and then remarking “I just love that.” Mr. Al Fayed then whisked Michael off to watch Fulham Football Club play soccer against Wigan. Mr. Al Fayed owns Fulham FC too. Spotting the pattern? Well, all that was what we pieced together as the weekend progressed. It was a quite remarkable visit to London that not only included shopping and sport, but also an interview with the tabloid The Mirror, and also… well also.. the story I am about to tell you.
Gloria and I tried to get through to our Michael contact on the Saturday to find out what Michael was doing and why he was here. The first thing we realised was that this was being classified as a strictly personal trip. It was not connected to his career; he was here for a rest. Of course later, Michael would tell us that himself. After the football match, we had no idea where he was going next. Prince Naceem, his mate, was punching some bloke in Manchester all night so we thought maybe Michael wanted some ring-side action, but he didn’t go there. At about 1.30am on Sunday, 11th April, Gloria received a call to say that Michael would attend the British Academy of Film and Television Awards in London that night. Elizabeth Taylor was to receive the Lifetime Achievement award. Cool! Michael at an award show! And here in old Blighty! Fiona put the news out on our MJ Telephone InfoLine and Web Site and I started to prepare myself for the possibility of going to London instead of university. After waking, we were told that while Michael was expected to attend the BAFTAs, he was no longer 100% confirmed. This sounded worrying, and we altered our news bulletins accordingly, totally aware however that many fans had already started travelling down. There was, of course, nothing else that we could do but hope for the best, knowing that with Michael, the only surprise is if there is no surprise.
I was one of the small number of fans, some from outside the UK, who put their arrangements on hold to do the “fan thing”. For me, it involved getting my dad to drive me to Cambridge to dump my stuff, then getting him to drive me to the train station, then finding my train had been replaced by a bus service, then finally getting to London and running to Islington, where the award ceremony was due to take place. In between all this, I was putting in phone calls every 30 minutes asking for confirmation that MJ was to be at the show. But nothing was known. Michael was here on private business. But damn it, this is what being a fan was all about, right? The risks! By the time I got to the Business Design Centre in London, at about 4.00pm, there were already several MJ fans there, and the numbers continued to swell. We cramped ourselves up next to the movie-star autograph hunters and awaited Michael’s arrival. I was also calling Gloria every 30 minutes to see if she had found out whether he was attending but her calls were not successful either… yet. All the fans in London were phoning Gloria as well, and her Bournemouth base became something of an operation control centre as she took calls on average of one every five minutes. She continued to put in phone calls to try and discover whether Michael was attending, and the message came back the same, “It’s not known yet.”...
All the fans expected me to come up with some magic answer to their questions; but I was as worried and excited as they were. Contrary to what someone called Teresa said to me in “public” recently on the King of Pop discussion board on the internet, working for MJNI has done nothing to quell my enthusiasm for Michael Jackson. She said I had lost the innocence of being a fan. Huh! Shows how little she knows. As people that know me will vouch for, somehow I managed to separate the fact that I volunteer for a Fan Club from the fact that I am a fan and this prevents me losing the sense of wonder that surrounds Michael Jackson. I love Michael Jackson, simple as that. He’s amazing. I drop most things to go and see him. And when I say see him, I mean, standing outside in the cold with other fans, chanting his name, showing support in public. And sometimes, something amazing happens. Which is what happened in London.
By the time all attendees of the BAFTAs had gone in, we realised that it was very unlikely that Michael was going to be there. But as Michael was staying with Mohammed Al Fayed, our Michael sources had no information on his schedule. Many fans latched themselves onto me, hoping that I would have some “inside-info” for them, but I was as confused and baffled as anyone. I just felt bad that we had put out that Michael was attending when it wasn’t clear anymore if he would be. It later became obvious, as you shall read, that there was a perfectly good reason for his non-attendance, something which neither MJNI, nor anyone else – including Michael – could have controlled. And besides, we’re fans! This is what we do, right? We hope! As a wise man once said to me, if we don’t have hope, we have nothing! And SOMETIMES, like I said, it all pays off. Like it did that night. OH MY GOD, like it DID that night...
We tried to get information from the police, each officer telling us a different thing. Some said “He’s in the building already, came in the back way.” Some said, “He’s not coming at all.” Some said, “Who?” (Ok, I lied about that bit.)
At one point, I phoned Gloria (I was phoning every 10 minutes, often using other people’s mobiles, thank you to all of you!) and she sounded close to collapse. “I can’t even go to the bathroom,” she said, “there’s no time! The phone is ringing once a minute!” The fans had been running around the Dorchester, The Lanesborough, The Carlton, Hamley’s, Tower Records… all the usual Michael haunts. After applying much pressure, Gloria managed to find out that Michael was NOT staying in any of the London hotels, and was in fact staying in a private residence, namely Mr. Al Fayed’s penthouse. This information was passed on, via myself, only to the fans already in London for the simple reason that we felt we shouldn’t broadcast private addresses on the internet or MJ Telephone InfoLine. The fans I told, told their friends, who told theirs, and that’s how the word spread! A true grapevine!
At the residence, we met Navi, who recommended that we wait around the back of the building for Michael. We agreed with him that it was more likely that if he went in or out, he was most likely to do so away from the public eye. So we waited in this London back street in the hope that Michael would arrive from wherever he was, or come out to wherever he was going. I was placing phone calls every few minutes by this point, trying to find out where Michael was. But I kept being told there were no news. We waited for about three hours, and to make matters worse, it had started to rain. My eye was constantly on my watch. I knew that my last train back to Cambridge left London just after 11.00pm because it was a Sunday. By 9.30pm many fans started to go home. A lot of them knew I was on the phone trying to find out what was going on, but they could see that I was as disappointed as everyone else. I was about to join the departing fans. But something crazy inside me made me stay. At 10.45pm, five minutes before I would have had to have jumped in a cab to get to the train station, I put another call. I explained that all we wanted was for Michael to know we were out here. I was told to phone back in five minutes. Five minutes later, the message was clear; “Don’t go home.” Michael was inside, and he had just been told we were waiting for him. I decided to forget about the train and went around telling all the fans what I had just been told. Some reacted with suspicion, and I could see some cursing me. I’m used to that; jealousy or bitterness is sadly present at most fan gatherings, but they can carry on getting angry as far as I’m concerned as they are in the minority. I think most of the fans understood that I was as petrified/excited as everyone else. For my part, it was a large responsibility telling people not to catch their last trips home, and I did because I felt it was the right thing to do. Luckily, it worked out!
And then after a very short period of time, the unbelievable happened. Oh my God. Michael Jackson, accompanied by just one bodyguard, Skipper, walked around the corner, heading straight for us. What must have amounted to dozens of phone calls from Gloria and myself had paid off, and I began to feel sick with excitement.
As Michael walked towards us, in a gorgeous coat and wearing his hat and mask, none of us quite believed it was really him. I heard at least one fan ask if it was Navi! But pretty soon, we all realised this was the real thing. He started to walk towards us, and we began speed-walking, telling each the other not to run, while starting to run! There was about 40 of us, but this number grew over the next hour or so to around 50. This is just my estimate of numbers: that wasn’t the first thing on my mind! We all seemed to realise at once (well, when I say “all” I’m not including, nor will I for the entire article, the handful of selfish fans who threatened to spoil the whole thing for everyone. Such people are regular faces to the fans. They know who they are and would reveal in this glory so I’ll stop) that we were crowding him and so we stopped. It was, admittedly, helped by the fact that Skipper told us all sternly to get into one single file line. “Stay in line!” we shouted to each other as we stepped out of the line to get a better glance at the man in the mask. He looked immaculate. His eyes were enormous. The mask accentuated them, as ever. His coat was so nice that I wanted it. I couldn’t believe that Michael Jackson had walked out of his nice comfy penthouse suite, gone down the road to the tradesmen’s entrance, just to say hello to us. Somehow, we lined up and Michael took the time to meet every single of us individually. Every one! All of us! You could take a photo of him, have your photo taken with him. He gave autographs out – I had people I wanted to get autographs for and didn’t manage to do it as I was too overcome with emotion. Not so much at meeting him, which is incredible enough, but at the fact he had taken the time to do this. You wanted to hug him, he said “Sure” and off you went. If you wanted to talk with him, he listened intently. I mean, he really listened: his eyes were fixed upon you, and he answered every question he was asked. “Mr. Jackson wants to talk to each of you” said Skipper, “but you must stay in line.” I was near the end of the line, and the excitement of watching everyone achieve their ambition was almost great to bear. I was just so sorry that some of my closest friends in the world were not there. Katherine Sommers was on a plane to India (as you do) and almost all my other MJ friends were absent too. That was very sad. When I made it to the front of the line, I met him, and had a small chat with him. I looked him in the eyes and said, “Thank you for doing this.” He said, “No problem.” I said, “I mean, I know this must be such a hassle for you…” He interrupted and said, “No!” I continued, “But you know, for us… well, we’ll never forget this. It’s very kind of you.” I told him that most of the people present were MJNI members, and he listened. He smiled with his eyes, and then I had a photo taken with him. It was so funny though – there were a couple of people taking photos of me with Michael (we all tried to take photos of each other but it didn’t really work!) and he didn’t know which camera to look at! And judging by the photo, he found it easier to just look down! It was hilarious, and whenever I look at the photo, I still think back in amazement to the fact that I was nudging Michael Jackson and telling him to stop looking at that camera and look at this one instead! How embarrassing (1)! I then ran off down the road and just screamed with delight. I was later told that this scream caused Michael to peer down the road and ask “Is he okay?” At which everyone laughed! How embarrassing (2)!
People were phoning their mothers on their mobile phones and giving the phone to Michael to say hello to them! It was just all too surreal to believe. I just wished the whole thing was being filmed by a TV crew. But of course, it was the fact that none of this was in the presence of the media that made the whole thing so special. He had no-one to impress or to play up to. He sold no extra records by doing this: we already own them all.
