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The bickering brothers

The brotherly bitterness was supposedly so biting that at the 1984 Grammy Awards ceremony where Michael won eight awards, many believed when Michael made a point of thanking his brothers – and Jermaine in particular – it was in fact wholly sarcastic.

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In 1991, a bootleg copy of a song recorded by Jermaine was leaked to the press, in which he criticised his brother’s plastic surgery and called him a “lonely superstar”. In an interview with the LA Times, Jermaine said that he’d written the song after Michael repeatedly refused to take his phone calls, saying: “I understand he’s a very busy person, but after you repeatedly try to contact your own brother and he doesn’t call you back, you begin to wonder if he hasn’t just completely lost touch with reality.”

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Three years after his death, in 2012, one of Michael’s former bodyguards, Matt Fiddes, told the press that at one point, while under the influence of drugs and resentful about his brothers’ insistence on him signing up to a Jackson 5 reunion, Michael had ordered him to shoot his brother Randy in the leg as he tried to force his way into his home.

The rapper row

In addition to his own family, Jackson engaged in rows with a number of fellow artists and musicians over the years. One famous example was with the rapper Eminem who, in 2004, notoriously poked fun at Jackson in his hit song and music video Just Lose It.

Addressing the controversy surrounding both Jackson’s appearance (at one point in the video, dressed as Jackson, Eminem’s nose falls off) and allegations of sexual misconduct with minors via his lyrics, Slim Shady was pretty shady.

Jackson confessed to feeling personally offended and demeaned by the rapper’s lyrics, and asked video channels such as BET and MTV to stop playing it.

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Raymone Bain, Jackson’s spokesperson at the time, said: “The entire video is inappropriate. [Jackson] is very disappointed, he is very angry. It’s one thing for there to be a spoof, it’s another to be insensitive and disrespectful. It crossed the line.”

The juiciest part of this story happened some three years later, when Jackson’s partner company bought the rapper’s publishing label, ultimately making Jackson the owner of Eminem’s back catalogue.

A royal rivalry

From the early 1980s, another supremely talented musician began to rise to prominence at around the same time as Jackson’s solo career was also taking off: Prince.

What perhaps started as healthy competition between the two rising megastars quickly descended into a back and forth battle. There was Prince’s refusal to appear in Jackson’s Bad music video because he didn’t want the star singing the song’s opening line (“Your butt is mine”) to him. And in his song Life o the Party, Prince sings, “My voice is getting higher; and I ain’t never had my nose done; that’s the other guy”.

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As a result, Jackson occasionally referred to Prince as “mean” and “rude” in interviews.

But perhaps the most famous meeting of the pair occurred when they appeared onstage for a musical duel at a 1983 James Brown concert.

Quincy Jones, producer of Jackson’s biggest hit records “Thriller”, “Bad” and “Off The Wall”, later told GQ magazine that after the concert Prince had tried to run over Jackson in his limo, saying: “He waited in the limousine to try and run over him and La Toya and his mother. He knew. Michael knows. He was there. He said that was his intention.”

The Beatles brawl

Another notable fallout occurred between Jackson and Paul McCartney. Though Jackson and The Beatles’ icon had previously collaborated on projects together, the former friends fell out in the mid 1980s.

Back then, ATV Music, which later became Sony Music, had put up the Beatles catalogue for sale. While McCartney had intentions of buying the catalogue back, he was outbid by the King of Pop, who bought the music for US$47 million.

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This was deemed by McCartney as underhanded and unscrupulous, particularly in light of their friendship, which never recovered, and the stars never worked together again.

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