In the summer of 1988, Michael Jackson booked five nights at Wembley Stadium in London. Demand for those tickets came in at over one and a half million — enough to fill the 72,000-seat stadium twenty times over. So they added more shows. And more. He ended up playing seven sold-out nights at Wembley, and the only reason he stopped there was that the stadium had reached its legal limit on the number of concerts it was allowed to stage that year.
The final total across those seven nights was 504,000 people. It broke the record previously held by Genesis, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, and on 8 September 1988 it put Michael Jackson into the Guinness World Records — the first of three entries he would earn from that single tour.
The scale of the whole operation is hard to picture. The Bad World Tour traveled with 22 truckloads of equipment, including 700 lights and 100 speakers, which had to be flown between countries in a Boeing 747. Over 16 months, he played 132 concerts in 15 countries to around 4.5 million people, grossing $125 million — at the time, the highest-grossing tour in history and the one that had played to more people than any other.
Michael Jackson – Live At Wembley (July 16, 1988)
The most famous of those seven Wembley nights was the third, on 16 July 1988, and the reason is who was sitting in the crowd. Diana, Princess of Wales, and Prince Charles came to the show.
Michael met her backstage beforehand and did two things. First, he handed over a cheque for $450,000 to the Prince’s Trust, her husband’s charity for young people. He also gave the couple gifts, including custom Bad tour jackets for their sons.
Then came the conversation people still love. Michael had deliberately removed “Dirty Diana” from that night’s setlist, worried the title might offend the Princess or the royal family. He told her so. And Diana told him it was one of her favorite songs. The song went back into the show at the last minute.
Michael Jackson meets Princess Diana and Prince Charles [Wembley July 16, 1988]
There is a small mystery attached to that, by the way. For years Michael himself said he had not been able to squeeze it back in. But people who were there insisted otherwise, and when the concert was officially released, “Dirty Diana” was on it. He performed it after all. What actually got cut for time was “The Way You Make Me Feel.”
There is one more thing worth knowing about that recording, and it explains a lot about him. No professional multi-camera master tapes of the show survived. The version fans can watch today exists only because Michael was such a perfectionist that he had the stadium screen feed recorded onto VHS for himself, every night, so he could study his own performance afterward and work out what to fix. When the concert was released in 2012, they used his personal tape.
He kept giving the money away too. After a birthday show in Leeds that August, he handed $130,000 to a charity called Give For Life. And critics who have watched the Wembley footage since tend to agree on one thing: the moonwalk he does during “Billie Jean” that night is as smooth as he ever managed it in his life.