Michael Jackson was one of the few people whose career was so enduring and whose songs were so widely loved that they have some significance for the vast majority of us. For many people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, his music was a backdrop to our lives in the discos and nightclubs or seemingly ever-present on the radio and television.

Many of us will have at least one Jackson album in our collection.

He was without doubt one of the few musicians whose immense talents and extraordinary catalogue of songs crossed boundaries of all sorts.

He was admired by people of all ages and by people from countries across the world.

He was one of the few pop stars who managed to combine such mass appeal with critical acclaim.

He was known as the King of Pop, and it is hard to argue with that description. In fact, it probably does not quite do him justice.

He was up there with the all-time legends and his death ranks alongside those of Elvis Presley and John Lennon in the scale of loss and shock.

We all know about the controversies around him and there is no need to repeat them here. It is enough to say that he visibly appeared to many of us to fade to a shadow of himself.

He became an increasingly bizarre, and one suspected, tortured man, who seemed utterly removed from the charismatic star of his former years.

The reasons for his long and tragic decline will be speculated and written about ad nauseam. For today, however, we choose to remember the remarkable star who lit up pop music, first with his brothers in The Jackson Five and then as one of the great solo musicians. Whatever the controversies, his legacy is one of genuine greatness.