Russell Baillie: Death gives wings to pop's Peter Pan

As pop has proved time and time again, death can be a great career move. For Michael Jackson it is likely to act as a sort of resurrection.

Gone soon will be the image of increasingly frail, increasingly pale Jackson, who was surely risking his final ignominy with his sold-out season of 50 farewell London concerts which were to start next month, the opening dates of which had been recently postponed.

Back will be Michael Jackson, the dazzling song 'n' dance man, captured in the videos which will forever define him - and which have made for alarming points of comparison in more recent times when he was caught on camera for reasons other than his music.

That young Jackson of old remains an entrancing wonder. That's whether his voice and body are jointly defying gravity on Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough or when he's leading the rubber-hipped zombie-meets-West Side Story chorus line in Thriller or so many other dazzling visual moments of a recording career that never really escaped the 80s. He proved he still had that showman magic, even if it was overshadowed by his messianic excesses, when he played two memorable shows in Auckland in 1996.

But, as has been widely documented, the years since have not been kind to Jackson and this musical legacy falls well short of many other pop superstars of comparable career lengths.

Admittedly, Thriller was the biggest-selling LP of all time, which was always going to cast a long shadow over what he did next. So much so that much of the last decades of his career was spent trying to recapture those glory days with greatest hits collections and reissues and misguided comebacks which amounted to not a lot.

His passing at least puts an end to reconciling his briefly brilliant, electric past with his ever-troubled present. And as those exuberant songs and clips go on high-rotate, our perception of him may pass from tragic back to magic. In death, pop's Peter Pan may fly again.