“Michael said he knew when he was writing it that it was a hit. Quincy thought it was a hit. But I don’t think any of us knew how huge it was going to be”: The making of Billie Jean, the single that transformed Michael Jackson into a phenomenon

Michael Jackson's original handwritten lyrics.

It is one of those before-and-after albums. There is music before Thriller. And music that was made in its wake. Even today, its stats are mind-boggling. To date, it has sold 70 million copies and has gone 34 times platinum in the US alone.

But Thriller was never a nailed-on success. Though Michael Jackson, feeling miffed that its predecessor Off The Wall hadn’t won a Grammy, had vowed to pull out all the stops on the follow up and give white America something it indisputably could not ignore, it took a while before the album would burrow its way from being just another Michael Jackson album through to cultural ubiquity; the biggest blockbuster album of them all.