Seven nights, one princess, one machine
Wembley Stadium, summer 1988. Michael Jackson’s Bad tour took seven sold-out nights there, 14, 15 and 16 July, then 22 and 23 July, then 26 and 27 August. The combined attendance entered the Guinness book at 504,000, past the four-night mark Genesis had held. Demand for the first five July dates alone had been talked of in the millions. The building had a quota. He hit it. Pop, in that year, did not get bigger than this without becoming a state visit, and on the third night it briefly was one.
Diana, Princess of Wales, and Prince Charles were in the 72,000 on 16 July. Jackson met them before the show. The meeting ran long, the start slipped, and The Way You Make Me Feel came off the list. He had worried about singing Dirty Diana in front of the woman who shared the name. She told him, he later said, that it was her favourite. The night as officially released includes the song. The rest of the machine ran as built: Smooth Criminal and its lean, Thriller, Billie Jean and the moonwalk’s smaller cousin, Bad, Man in the Mirror. Jennifer Batten’s guitar cut through a band that was there to frame one body.
What you hear, on the film that came out with Bad 25, is control. Every hit is a cue. The fedora, the single glove’s afterlife, the stop-time in Smooth Criminal where gravity is treated as a suggestion. Stadium pop before this had often been a singer in front of a large noise. Jackson made the noise choreography. 72,000 people were not asked to sing so much as to witness a sequence that had been drilled until it looked like instinct.
This particular concert took place on July 16, 1988, at Wembley Stadium in London, to a sold-out crowd of 72,000, which included Diana, Princess of Wales and Charles, Prince of Wales.
(Michael Jackson, official film notes, Live at Wembley)
The seven nights are the record. The 16th is the one with a face in the royal box and a camera that stayed. Around the World, the NBC special, had already started turning the tour into television. Wembley finished the job. A charity giant and a rock band had used this stadium. Jackson used it as a stage the size of his videos, which is to say he refused the distance. The back row still got the steps.
Leave the later life out of the floodlights. On this July night the story is simpler and larger: a singer at the far end of his powers, a building he filled until the city ran out of legal nights, and a princess in the dark holding, among other gifts, a tour jacket. The music is Bad, which means the songs are bright, hard, and sure of their own feet. The concert is the proof that the album’s title was a posture, and the posture worked.
