Michael Jackson’s music feels like a horror soundtrack now

Ben, the two of us need look no more

We both found what we were looking for

With a friend to call my own

I’ll never be alone

And you my friend will see

You’ve got a friend in me

The sound of Michael Jackson’s Ben swirled out of the AM transistor radio around my darkened bedroom and struck something deep inside the soul of a lonely, shy teenager.

Painfully girlfriend-less, the words told me there was someone out there for me.

It never worried me that the Ben in the song was male. It did perturb me a little later when I found out the song was the theme to Willard, a strange movie about a weird teenager and his rat, which becomes the killer who needs to take revenge on those who wronged him and his family.

I still loved the song and the way Michael Jackson sang it. There were other Jackson songs in the soundtrack of my youth … Never Can Say Goodbye (done by the family band the Jackson Five) is still the finest version of that lament for lost love.

In my case, it was more lament for love that never was because I did most of my adoring from afar.

Also, in those days, Michael was black and a lot of my music was Motown and soul (not all that common in a white boy, then).

As his skin got lighter and his music more disco-ish, I never felt the connection I did in the early days – because I had a nagging feeling this was all about money, not music.

But I still have a lot of his music here and there – on vinyl, tapes, CDs and now, of course, USBs, as well as in my iTunes collection.

So do billions of other people, for whom Michael Jackson is the boy genius who stayed that way all his life and who, like Ben, felt he was “not wanted anywhere”.

I can no longer think that way about Michael Jackson. Not after I watched a large chunk of the much talked-about documentary, Leaving Neverland, on Friday night.

It was pretty much like a horror movie.

Everything unfolded slowly, in a grim progression. You knew where it was headed, but inside a little voice muttered: tell me it isn’t so.

I watched Wade Robson and James Safechuck, the prepubescent boys (one Australian, one American) who were swept up into Michael Jackson’s fantasy world.

The stories of abuse have come out before and Jackson defenders are calling these men liars.

They didn’t look like liars to me. They looked like innocent boys who went willingly with a sexual predator … willingly because they were too young to know; because this was glamorous and exciting.

Jackson slowly, painstakingly and thoroughly groomed them to be his sex toys … and even got the families to buy in, because they didn’t know.

There’s a chilling part in the documentary when one of the victims describes how Jackson would implement “action drills” if someone stumbled upon them: clothes had to be put back on in a flash, innocent poses had to be struck.

Jackson knew what he was doing was wrong. He co-opted starry-eyed boys to be co-conspirators in their defilement.

I couldn’t watch the rest. The song Ben will never be the same, with its now-creepy chorus:

I used to say “I” and “me”

Now it’s “us”, now it’s “we”

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