At the risk of damning a dead man with faint praise, perhaps the best thing you can say about Joe Jackson is that he may not unequivocally be the most tyrannical and monstrous father in pop history. There are other contenders for the title.
Even against such stiff competition, Joe Jackson has a shot at the title. A former boxer and failed blues musician, his main skill appeared to be devising innovative ways to make his children’s lives miserable. He constantly added new chapters to a catalogue of physical and mental abuse, that, when it finally came to light in the 1980s, seemed to provide the answer to a number of questions about his son Michael. Once you knew what Michael Jackson’s childhood and early career had been like, the issue wasn’t so much why he was apparently turning so weird but why it hadn’t happened sooner.
Even without their father’s influence, the Jacksons’ childhood would have been unusual. Their mother was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, fond of getting her kids to pore over the Watchtower’s illustrations of the imminent armageddon. She was also said to swab her children with rubbing alcohol – part of an obsession with cleanliness so extreme it turned her children into germophobes – and smear their faces with Vaseline on the grounds that it made them look “nice and shiny”. In winter, she reportedly sent them to school with hot boiled potatoes in their pockets in the belief this would ward off the cold.
But it was Joe Jackson who transformed their home life from merely unusual to nightmarish. He was a distant parent. “None of us can remember him holding us or cuddling us or telling us ‘I love you’,” Jermaine Jackson subsequently recalled. But the discovery that his offspring had musical talent turned him from merely cold and violent into a despot. He would beat them with a belt buckle or the cord of an electric kettle, or make them spend hours carrying cinder blocks from one side of their garden to the other when they incurred his wrath. The Jackson 5, as they were to become, were not allowed outside to play with other children: they rehearsed for five hours a day after school, their enthusiasm incentivised by the fact that if they got a dance step wrong their father would order them to break a branch off a tree in their garden that he then hit them with.
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