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.
When it was released 43 years ago today (30 November), few reviewers marked it out as an instant classic. In the UK especially, it was seen as something of a disappointment – NME greeted it with mild disdain, saying: "the overall feeling that comes from Thriller is that of barely developed artist being given too much artistic control”. Meanwhile, Smash Hits gave it a cool seven and a half out of ten.
It didn’t help matters that probably its weakest track - The Girl Is Mine, a cornball duet with Paul McCartney - was chosen as lead single. A lot, then, was riding on the follow-up.
For a while, Jackson had been thinking about writing a song about the girls that would hang around when he and his brothers had toured in the 1970s. He maintains in his 1988 memoir Moonwalk though that there was no real Billie Jean and her character was merely a composite of the stalkers attracted to The Jacksons: “I used to be really amazed by it,” he wrote. “I couldn't understand how these girls could say they were carrying someone's child when it wasn't true.”
“Even today, there are girls who come to the gate at our house and say the strangest things, like, ‘Oh, I'm Michael's wife,’ or ‘I'm just dropping off the keys to our apartment.’ There was another girl who claimed I had gone to bed with her, and she made threats. People yell into the intercom that Jesus sent them to speak with me and God told them to come - unusual and unsettling things.”
But according to J Randy Taraborrelli, author of Michael Jackson: The Magic and The Madness, one stalker in particular took things a disturbing step further. She sent the singer a parcel containing a gun, and a letter asking him to commit suicide at a particular time, so that she could follow suit and kill ‘their’ baby, so they could be together in the ‘next life’.
Billie Jean, then, is dealing with some dark stuff and thus required a suitable musical setting. Quincy Jones’s engineer Bruce Swedien, talking to The Blender suggested that the producer knew the scale of the challenge the team were embarking on: “When we recorded ‘Billie Jean’ … Quincy told me, ‘Okay, this piece of music has to have the most unique sonic personality of anything that we have ever recorded.’”
First of all, Swedien worked on the drum sound. He placed Leon ‘Ndugu’ Chancler’s kit on a plywood drum platform and covered his kick drum to isolate the sound, added wood taps between beats. He also brought in a synth bass line – played by Greg Phillinganes – to sit alongside Leon Johnson’s electric bass.
Then there were those spooked synth notes in the intro. Keyboard player Bill Wolfer had played with the Jacksons on their recent Victory tour. “He (Jackson) had laid down bass and a drum machine. Then he had to find the sound,” Wolfer said on a Youtube video he posted in 2024 about his part in the track. “He had a Yahama CS80 there. He said ‘I want you to make a sound like you played on one of the soundchecks on the tour’”. Wolfer racked his brains and eventually remembered a strings-with-brass sound he had messed around with the previous year.
Jones and Jackson then added some little touches – the ‘don’t think twice’ line is sung through a six foot long cardboard tube. The producer also brought in Tom Scott to play a lyricon, a wide-controlled analogue synth which brings its own esoteric flavour to the mix.
Jackson meanwhile nailed his vocal in one take – and he and Jones decided to keep in the whoops, grunts and vocal tics which would soon become a Jackson signature and later a source of much ridicule.
However, the producer was less certain about the unusually long intro. “I said, ‘Michael we’ve got to cut that intro,’” Jones recalled years later. “He said, ‘But that’s the jelly! That’s what makes me want to dance.’ And when Michael Jackson tells you, ‘That’s what makes me want to dance,’ well, the rest of us just have to shut up.”
Before it was put to bed there was the little matter of the title. Quincy Jones suggested changing the title to ‘Not My Lover’, thinking that record buyers would be confused that Jackson had written a song about the tennis player Billie Jean King. Jackson dug his heels in and the title remained.
Then testing his relationship with Jones further, Jackson, feeling that as the final version closely resembled his demo, asked for co-production credits. However, Jones declined and it led to a frosty atmosphere between the two in the studio for a few days.
The mixing process was an exhaustive one. Writing on his own Facebook page in 2013, Swedien recalls playing the second mix to artist and producer. “They loved it!!! They were all dancing and carrying on like crazy!!! Smiles all around! Then Michael slipped out of the control room, turned around and motioned to me to follow him... Then he whispered to me, ‘Please Bruce, it’s perfect, but turn the bass up just a tiny bit, and do one more mix, please.…’”
Swedien obliged. “Then Quincy pulled me over into the corner and said ‘Add a little garlic salt to the snare and the kick. Just a squirt!!!”. So I went back into the control room and added a little garlic salt to the snare and the kick. Just a squirt!!! Now I was up to mix 20 on Billie Jean.”
“I had a stack of 1/2 inch tapes almost to the ceiling!!! I would do a few mixes, we’d listen... Then do a few more.” Eventually by mix 91, Jones asked Swedien to play the second one again, which they all agreed was the one.
Finally, they had something with its own unique sonic personality – Billie Jean sounded a world away from the funk and disco-rooted material of Off The Wall. “There are three sonic personalities on that song that you can identify it,” says Bill Wolfer. “If you hear three or four beats of Ndugu’s drums and you go ‘oh yeah Billie Jean’. Then when that bass comes in and it’s Louis Johnson backed by Greg Phillinganes doing the tonic notes, and then I come in with the CS80 sound. Those the different elements bring a sonic personality so that before Michael even starts singing you know you’re listening to Billie Jean.”
“It’s an amazing record – it’s dark, it’s hypnotic and it’s really sparse. It’s all Michael’s vision. You can see how Michael and Quincy were starting to veer in different directions. Michael was asserting his thing. Michael said he knew when he was writing it that it was a hit. Quincy thought it was a hit. I thought it was a hit. But I don’t think any of us knew how huge it was going to be.”
Indeed. Released at the start of the New Year, it slowly climbed the chart in both UK and US, reaching the top in both countries at the start of March. The magnificent video helped of course. But it was Jackson’s performance of the song at the Motown 25 celebration that transformed Billie Jean from just another big hit into a phenomenon. Jackson debuted the ‘moonwalk’ (though British TV viewers had already seen Jeffrey Daniel of Shalamar pull off a similar move on Top Of The Pops the previous year) and his performance drew praise from no less a luminary as Fred Astaire who called Jackson personally, correctly identifying his dancing as “angry”.
The single eventually sold 760,000 in the UK, but in the US it eventually racked up over 10 million sales, going diamond into the bargain. From there on, the Thriller campaign gathered momentum – later came the release of the title track, with the John Landis-directed video. Ahead lay pop immortality.
Michael Jackson’s reputation lies in a strange no-man’s land in 2025. An official biopic arrives next year that will doubtless brush all the deeply troubling other stuff about this incredibly talented but immensely damaged man under the carpet. Whatever your opinion on that, his music now seems uncancel-able, so ingrained has it become in our popular music and culture. And listening to the best of it – Off The Wall and the bulk of Thriller, including Billie Jean – you have to ask, why would you ever want to try?
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