Suffer the little Jackson children

By PAUL VALLELY

Insane is a hard word, said Phil Spector. And he hadn't even seen the Martin Bashir interview with Michael Jackson. The confluence of the week's two big events in the world of pop and rock - Wacko Jacko's admission that he likes sleeping with young boys (for fun, not sex, you understand) and the arrest of legendary producer Phil Spector for murder - prompt interesting questions about the relationship between music and madness.

"I have not been well," Spector, the man who made many of the greatest pop hits of all time, recently told the rock journalist Mick Brown, who coaxed the reclusive genius into breaking a 25-year silence.

"Insane is a hard word. I wasn't insane, but I wasn't well enough to function as a regular part of society, so I didn't. I chose not to." He paused. "I have devils inside that fight me."

Jacko is not nearly so direct, though his admissions in his ITV interview with Martin Bashir (which screens on Sunday on TV One) are pretty damning. "The longest suicide note in history", one figure in the pop world has dubbed it.

There are incredible stories about plastic surgery to help him sing high notes, about dangling his son from a hotel balcony, and about how he snatched his daughter Paris from hospital and took her home, still covered in afterbirth and wrapped in a towel, minutes after she was born.

What is common to all these stories is Jackson's inability to see how they would strike most ordinary people. What is it about the rock world: does it drive people mad, or do they have to be like that to get to the top in the first place?

The tabloids in Britain, of course, have concentrated on the sex. Understandably, following allegations of child abuse in 1993 when he paid $31 million to 13-year-old Jordan Chandler after being accused of molesting him. Jackson maintains to Bashir that he had settled just to get the matter dealt with swiftly. After all, what's $31 million when you have trillions in the bank?

Yet there seems something preposterously innocent about the man. Mad, yes. Sad, yes. But, bad? In the end I somehow believe that Wacko really did invite kids over to see his orang-utan and take a ride on his massive empty ferris wheel and then tucked them up in bed with "milk and cookies".

Being in bed with children, he says, is "very beautiful". Very worrying, says Bashir. No, says Jacko, "It's very right. It's very loving. That's what the world needs now - more love, more heart." No doubt, this is weird. No doubt, if your kids went on a sleepover and you heard their friend's dad had slept in the same bed with them all night you'd be asking questions.

And yet every parent knows the pleasure of being woken in the middle of the night by the tapping of tiny feet across the landing and the expectant little face appearing at the side of the bed asking: "Can I get in with you?" There is something about the unconditional love that a child offers and craves which touches the deepest part of what it means to be human. Even if it does mean a restless night.

Part of Jackson's disjuncture with reality is that he doesn't seem to understand you are only supposed to do this with your own children. But that shows only that he's weird rather than wicked.

It's not hard to see why. You don't have to believe he was telling the truth about his plastic surgery - he's only had two ops, he said, on his Concorde-shaped nose, and that was to help him sing high notes - to accept that in his core he is very mixed up about the business of childhood.

The interview reveals just how brutal a bully his father was. That combined with a relentless Jackson Five showbiz itinerary robbed him of his childhood. What he is doing now - with the aid of his vast fortune - is to attempt to recreate that. The experience of touring as a child star and having to pretend to be asleep while his brothers brought girls back to their bedroom for sex is enough to arrest the sexual development of many people.

Money is what allows him to do it. The fortune that Phil Spector made from his famous wall of sound enabled him to build a wall of security round his mock-French chateau in Los Angeles, where the actress Lana Clarkson was found shot dead. There for years he hid away, unable to face being with people, unable to face being with himself. It's the same with Jackson. Money insulates mad rich people from reality.

"I love climbing trees, it's my favourite thing - having water balloon fights and climbing trees," says Jackson, who now wants to adopt at least 10 more children - a boy and a girl from every continent. "That's my dream," he says.

Heaven help them if he does. What Jackson's sad tale shows is that you can do a lot of damage to children in those early years. Sometimes money only makes the problem worse.

- INDEPENDENT

* Living with Michael Jackson screens on TV One tomorrow at 7pm.