He liked to be known as the King of Pop, and only a handful of performers — Presley, Sinatra, the Beatles — could challenge Michael Jackson for the title of most successful popular music entertainer of all time.

Although ill health dogged his career in later years, and his reputation was irrevocably tarnished by the allegations of child abuse levelled against him in 1993 and again in 2004, the sheer scale of Jackson’s achievements remains undiminished. With sales of about 53 million copies, Thriller, his magnum opus, released in 1982, remains by far the bestselling album ever released. The follow-up, Bad, from 1987, has sold 28 million copies and sales of Dangerous (1991) stand at 29 million. His total record sales were estimated by his Sony Music label to be in excess of 750 million. These staggering figures mark only some of the peaks of a career begun at the age of 5.

Born in 1958, in Gary, Indiana, Michael was the seventh of nine children born to Joe Jackson and his wife Katherine (née Scruse). Joe was a steel mill worker who in his spare time played guitar in an R&B group called the Falcons. Katherine, a devout Jehovah’s Witness who played clarinet, piano and sang, worked as an assistant in a department store.

Under Joe’s strict tutelage and with encouragement and support from Katherine, five of the brothers formed a group called the Jackson 5 with Michael as the lead singer. The sixth, Randy, was still too young but eventually joined the line-up much later on, while of the sisters, LaToya enjoyed limited success as a solo act in adult life, and Janet eventually became a star in her own right. “I was so little when we began to work on our music that I don’t remember much about it,” Jackson mused in his autobiography Moonwalk, published in 1988. “When you’re a showbusiness child, people make a lot of decisions concerning your life when you’re out of the room.” The book’s title was a reference to the distinctive and deft foot-shuffling dance that he performed on stage and made his own.

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The Kremlin is increasingly worried that 'empty and senseless Western Music' is crowding out 'glorious, inspiring Soviet songs'

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Joe Jackson managed the group with a rod of iron and in later life Michael spoke regretfully of the rift which developed and was never healed between him and his father. Nevertheless, Jackson Sr successfully steered the group from talent competitions and a residency in the local striptease parlour to a recording contract with Tamla Motown records, signed in 1969 reputedly for a dismal 2.7 per cent cut of the royalties.

Success with Motown was instantaneous and spectacular, as the group’s first four singles — I Want You Back, The Love You Save, ABC and I’ll Be There — all went to the top of the US chart, each title selling over a million copies. Michael was 11 when he first saw his own face on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. In 1971, two years after the Jackson 5’s first hit, Michael was signed separately to Motown as a solo act and immediately sallied forth with a string of his own hits — Got to be There, Rockin’ Robin, Ben (a US No 1 in 1972) and others — which were released in tandem with his work as a member of the group.

In 1975, frustrated by the Motown supremo Berry Gordy’s unwillingness to let them write or produce their own material, four of the Jackson 5, including Michael, joined the exodus of acts from the ailing label. Changing their name to the Jacksons for contractual reasons, they signed to Epic, where they teamed up with the celebrated writing and production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. The results were mixed. The single Show You the Way to Go was the group’s first and only UK No 1 in 1977, but the album Goin’ Places, released later the same year, failed to reach the US Top 60.

In 1979 Jackson accepted an offer to co-star with his longstanding friend and mentor Diana Ross in The Wiz, a film version of The Wizard of Oz. While working on the film he met the veteran producer Quincy Jones and invited him to produce his next solo album, Off the Wall. This was the collection which marked the start of Jackson’s passage to the super league, and took his success as a solo artist into realms beyond anything achieved by the Jacksons. It has sold 19 million copies to date. Even so, no one was fully prepared for the epoch-making success of Thriller.

Again produced by Jones, the album yielded an incredible total of seven Top Ten hit singles in America. Retailers reported that Thriller’s appeal reached far beyond the normal strata of record buyers, attracting people who had never previously visited a record shop in their lives. Even a documentary, The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1984), quickly became established as the bestselling music video ever released.

Quite why Jackson should have been so phenomenally successful at this point is difficult fully to explain. Musically, he was not a great innovator like Elvis Presley or Bob Dylan, nor was he a role model for a generation like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones had been before him. But he emerged as a spectacularly talented all-rounder at a time when pop music was taking over as the world’s primary mainstream entertainment. He was as good a dancer as he was a singer and he employed the new technology to make videos that were as full of stylish impact as his music. The appeal of his impossibly slick and electrifying song-and-dance routines transcended barriers of age, race, class and nationality.

Above all, Jackson was a stringent perfectionist. He explained why it had taken five years to release Bad, the follow-up to Thriller: “Quincy and I decided that this album should be as close to perfect as humanly possible. A perfectionist has to take his time. He can’t let it go before he’s satisfied. He can’t. When it’s as perfect as you can make it, you put it out there. That’s the difference between a No 30 record and a No 1 record that stays No 1 for weeks.”

Bad was very much in the latter category, as was Jackson’s next album, Dangerous, released in 1991. And even HIStory — Past, Present and Future — Book 1, an unwieldy double album combining 15 greatest hits and 15 new songs released after the torrent of bad publicity surrounding the first allegations of child abuse in 1993, had achieved global sales of 18 million copies by the time of his death.