Ask two brothers about the same old adventure and you’ll often get two different stories. The Jacksons are no exception.
This Friday, Nov. 13, Michael’s brothers’ group The Jacksons, billed with Jackie and Marlon, plays the Eventim Apollo in London. The show starts at 7 PM UK time, which is 2 PM on the East Coast. It’s a fitting city, because London gave the family one of the wildest welcomes of their lives.
That first visit came in the fall of 1972. Michael and his brothers were still the Jackson 5, and they touched down at London’s Heathrow Airport on Oct. 29, 1972. It was their first trip to Britain.
Jackie Jackson, one of the original Jackson 5 brothers, looked back on it with HELLO! magazine last year. “I remember coming over to London for the first time,” he said.
What sticks with him is the pilot. Before the boys ever stepped off the plane, the pilot came back with a heads-up. As Jackie remembers it, the man told them: “Guys, you got about 10,000 screaming fans waiting for you in sleeping bags at the airport.”
He wasn’t far off. Motown’s own history says thousands of fans swarmed Heathrow when the Jackson 5 and the Osmonds flew in from the U.S. that month. Motown adds a line that still makes fans grin: “Fortunately, they didn’t land at the same time.”
“So we landed in London and it was pandemonium,” Jackie said. “They didn’t have enough security, and I think it was winter.”
It was really late October. After 54 years, we’ll let that one slide.
Back in 2012, Fuse sat the brothers down to compare life on the road then and now, so you can hear them swap touring memories in their own voices.
Michael’s brothers talk about touring, then and now
Back at Heathrow, Michael was caught right in the middle of the crowd. His scarf turned into the hottest souvenir in London. “Michael had this scarf around his neck and one fan was pulling it one way and other fans were pulling it the other way,” Jackie said.
Then there was Tito, Michael’s big brother. Somewhere in all that excitement, Tito ended up stranded on the roof of a car with fans all around him.
“Tito was on top of a car called the Daimler, and he was trying to get off but he couldn’t,” Jackie said.
And this is where the brothers part ways. When Marlon told the story to Fuse in 2012, he remembered it as a Rolls-Royce limousine. So both of them agree Tito was stuck up on top of a very fancy British car. They just can’t agree which one.
The fans didn’t stop at the airport, either. They laid siege to the boys’ London hotel, the Churchill. The very next night, Oct. 30, 1972, the Jackson 5 performed at the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
This fan upload is the best way to see the brothers the way London saw them that week, just one day after the airport mob.
The Jackson 5 on stage at the London Palladium in 1972
Tito passed away in 2024, and his brothers still laugh about that day.
British TV has kept inviting the family back over the years, and this visit to Good Morning Britain lets you hear the brothers explain why they’re still not ready to slow down.
The Jacksons visit British morning TV
On Friday, the music comes back to the city where the brothers first found out how much Britain loved them. Somebody in that crowd ought to bring two signs, one saying “Daimler” and one saying “Rolls-Royce.”