'There was so much hype': Memories of when Michael Jackson came to Cork
Michael Jackson with guitarist Jennifer Batten on stage at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork in 1988. Picture: Irish Examiner Archive
There was no one like Michael Jackson. For a period in the 1980s, he really was the King of Pop. In the summer of 1988, during a glorious August bank holiday weekend, he performed in Ireland for the first time with two gigs at Cork’s Páirc Uí Chaoimh, as part of his Bad world tour. The city, which has arguably never experienced another showtime like it, went ‘wacko for Jacko’.
“The whole buzz was extraordinary,” says Eddie O’Hare, a photographer with the then “I was out doing photographs in town, around the streets, going to the makeshift campsites; there was a big one where Mahon Point Shopping Centre is today. I remember the Marina being packed full of tents. There would have been people sleeping in cars. Everybody was in brilliant form.”
O’Hare has been on duty for numerous Cork concerts since, from Bruce Springsteen to Oasis, but still feels the excitement around Jackson’s visit was on a different level.
“Jackson was more everybody's cup of tea compared with Springsteen or Oasis back in the day. Jackson appealed to everybody. The city came alive,” he recalls.
It was thanks to music promoter Oliver Barry’s vision and guile that Jackson was lured to Leeside. Barry got in touch with Jackson’s agents in Los Angeles and convinced them Páirc Uí Chaoimh would be an ideal venue for Jackson to include during the European leg of his world tour. The GAA stadium had successfully staged Siamsa Cois Laoi concerts going back to 1978, and a U2 gig in 1987, the year the band graced the cover of Time magazine. Even still, people were in disbelief that Jackson would be coming to town.
“It was such a surprise that we got him,” says Jim Comet, whose band, Belsonic Sound, performed at local venue Sir Henry’s the night before Jackson’s first concert, as part of a series of satellite gigs that went on over the long weekend. “The people who managed Michael Jackson, the cabal who sent these big acts out on tours, when they saw what happened with U2, would have said, ‘We can put Michael Jackson in there next year.’
“Páirc Uí Chaoimh was the perfect venue for Michael Jackson because it could fit 60,000 to 70,000 people per night, and because it's a stadium everybody could see what's happening on stage. Slane Castle, for example, wouldn't have been suited to it, because if you're looking from a vantage point where you're looking up at the stage, you're not getting the benefit of the production, all the dancing. The show was very choreographed. Every song was a different production number. He probably had as many choreographers on that tour as roadies. With Michael Jackson, you have to be able to see everything.”
Jackson was arguably near the top of his game in 1988 after an already impressive career in the business. As the lead singer and child star of The Jackson 5, one of Motown’s finest acts, it seemed he’d been famous for ever. The Jackson 5’s number one hit, topped the charts back in 1969. Solo album in 1979 had produced such hits as and . But it was the success of in 1982 and beyond that sent him into the stratosphere.
Created with producer Quincy Jones, seven of the album’s 10 tracks hit the top 10 in the US. and were number one all over the world, and tunes such as the title track were accompanied by impressive music videos that kick-started the MTV era and added to ubiquity of Jackson’s music. A megastar was born.
As well as the music success, Jackson was a consistent presence in the celebrity pages through the mid-part of the decade, with a succession of stories adding to the mystique. His skin tone changed, he had plastic surgery on his nose and chin, hung out with a pet monkey, and reports of his lifestyle featured everything from sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, to an attempt to buy the bones of Joseph Merrick (the 'Elephant Man').
At least the release of in August 1987, got people talking about his music again.
“There was so much hype about him coming over to Ireland,” says Mike Hanrahan, who performed with Stockton’s Wing, as one of the warm-up acts in Cork. “He was a complete enigma, a rumour machine his whole life. There was big talk about his chimpanzee, Bubbles, and about how he was sleeping in an oxygen chamber. It was only years later we heard all of what was going on in his life [regarding paedophilia allegations].”
Part of Jackson’s entourage in Cork included Jimmy Safechuck, a 10-year-old boy. The press commented about the “young sidekick at his side”, “munching peanuts on a sofa”, almost whimsically, as if, naively, there was nothing troubling about the situation. Many years later, in his late 30s, Safechuck filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against Jackson’s estate, claiming he was regularly abused by Jackson.
Hanrahan continues: “There was all that intrigue about him, but when he went out on stage, that was gone. He was an incredible showman. I love U2 and their music. Some of their gigs were iconic as well and the energy that they give off. I'm a huge fan of the band, but there’s nobody like Jackson. Even Prince was brilliant, but Jackson had something different. It was such a huge sound in the band. Every one of them were exceptional, top-class musicians who were pumping it out. There was a great groove to the music. The stadium was rocking.”
Jackson had arrived in Cork airport on a private plane, Friday morning, July 29, a few weeks before his 30th birthday. He was billeted at Jury’s Hotel on the Western Road (since replaced by the River Lee Hotel). On the Saturday morning around 9.40am, he snuck out of the back of the hotel — wearing black jeans, white jacket and trainers — with six bodyguards for a stroll around Cork, unbeknownst to fans who were keeping vigil in the lobby at the front of the hotel.
The day was kissed with sunshine. Pubs doubled their trade. Street hawkers did a busy trade shifting Michael Jackson merchandise, including T-shirts, headbands, scarves and Michael Jackson candy floss.
There was a constant buzzing of helicopters overhead — a novelty in those pre-Celtic Tiger days — as rich businessmen, including Ben Dunne, and celebrities such as Brendan Grace, Michelle Rocca and Michael Lyster, convened on Cork. Future taoiseach Bertie Ahern and his daughters, the future novelist Cecelia Ahern, aged seven, and her older sister Georgina (who went on to marry Westlife’s Nicky Byrne), were also there.
Stockton’s Wing kicked off around 6pm. They were followed by British singer Kim Wilde, before Jacko, flanked by four male dancers, burst on stage with an electrifying version of He hardly drew breath, ploughing through banger after banger, unleashing his arsenal of dance moves — the quick jumps, the corkscrew kicks, the James Brown funky chicken, and the pièce de résistance, the moonwalk.
“He had his dancers and the stage was specially laid out so the band were at the back,” says Comet. “There was huge room at the front of the stage with a special floor where he could dance. A friend of mine was working on stage. He had to run out every so often with a few other people with towels mopping the stage so nobody would slip.
“What sent the crowd mental was when he moonwalked. To see Michael Jackson moonwalking live was unreal. That was his trick. He did it in three or four of his videos. At the time when people talked about Michael Jackson or when they tried to emulate him, they always tried to do the moonwalk. So, to see the guy who perfected the moonwalk doing the moonwalk was incredible.”
Hanrahan recalls Jackson’s performance of — in which dancers emerged on stage dressed as monsters at its climax — being a highlight, and the majesty of his lead guitarist, Jennifer Batten. Jackson’s band also included the keyboardist Greg Philinganes, drummer Ricky Lawson, and a 26-year-old Sheryl Crow as a backing singer (see panel).
The crowd on the pitch at Páirc Uí Chaoimh was peppered with US flags. Fans fainted. Others lost their shoes, or their friends, in the bedlam. Jackson didn’t let up, finishing his set with and with smoke billowing from the stage, before returning on stage to do two songs for his encore, wrapping up the show with
Jackson did it all over again the following night. On Monday, the circus moved on to Marbella, Spain, for the next leg of his tour. Jackson boarded his private plane, en route to Luton Airport, at one o’clock in the afternoon. O’Hare was waiting at Cork airport for his departure.
“I knew a guy, John Smith, who was in the PR department at the airport,” says O’Hare. “He said, ‘Right. You're coming with me.’ I was brought out onto the tarmac and, as Jackson arrived, I was literally standing at the bottom of the steps of the plane. He couldn’t avoid me. He just waved to me and went up the steps. And that was it — he was gone.”
- The Michael Jackson biopic, starring his nephew Jaafar Jackson, is opening in Irish cinemas on Friday
Years before Sheryl Crow won nine Grammy Awards, and before she acted on TV shows such as , the country star toured with Michael Jackson as a back-up singer on his Bad World Tour 88.
Crow grew up in a town in Missouri. She was in her mid-20s, teaching and making music for TV adverts, when she ended up duetting with Jackson on which led to an invitation to tour with him. She didn’t even have a passport when she landed the gig.
On stage with Jackson, she often wore pink lipstick and had strikingly big hair — de rigueur for the 1980s. She also starred in his video for , part of a two-year association with Jackson, before going on to record her own hit records, including in 1994.
Michael Jackson’s Bad World Tour 88 was his first solo concert tour; his previous Victory tour in 1984 was with his brothers. The Bad tour began in September 1987 with a gig in Tokyo, Japan. It was conceived to promote the third album of his solo career. Jackson had earlier released (1979) and (1982) to huge acclaim. Bad was another chart-topping success, the first album in US Billboard Hot 100 history to achieve five Number 1 hits, all of them Jackson performed at Páirc Uí Chaoimh — and
Jackson performed 123 dates on the tour, creating sensation wherever he went — in Japan, the press gushed about “Typhoon Michael”; the British tabloids christened him “The Earl of Whirl”.
He kicked off the European leg of his tour in Rome towards the end of May 1988. A couple of days before the summer solstice, Jackson gigged in front of the Reichstag building in West Berlin. Fans behind the Berlin Wall convened in a stadium in East Berlin to listen to the concert, albeit with a two-minute delay so East German authorities could edit any unsavoury political comments that Jackson might have made.
Jackson’s visit to London was a tour highlight — he staged seven sold-out concerts at Wembley Stadium over the summer. Prince Charles and Lady Diana were guests on the third night of that run. He stayed on the road for a year and a half, playing his last tour gig in Los Angeles in January 1989. Tired of, ahem, working day and night, Jackson announced it would be his final tour, as he wanted to focus on filmmaking.
Eventually, he returned to Ireland twice more during subsequent world tours, performing at Lansdowne Road (1992) and the RDS Arena (1997).
