The rumour, which everyone expected and all shrugged off, was that King of Pop Michael Jackson was dead.

Well, this year the macabre rumour became reality and amazement and disbelief swept across the vast festival site like a shockwave. Sometimes the worst of bad jokes come true. Last week Jackson really did die.

What intrigues me – in amongst all the scrabbling over his final moments, his alleged dependence on prescription drugs, his eccentricities and the allegations of pederasty that refuse to go away – is the notion that, in Jackson, the 21st century has its first genuine global moment of "where were you when…?"

I've lived through more than my fair share. I still remember my mother's head flicking toward me in utter shock as an emotionless newscaster announced starkly that "Elvis Presley, the king of rock 'n' roll, is dead". Her wide-eyed look of disbelief was duplicated on millions of faces last week as the world reeled at the reports that Jackson had met a similarly untimely end.

Then there was John Lennon. And Princess Di. To a lesser degree the rock 'n' roll world momentarily stopped turning when Kurt Cobain shot himself
and Michael Hutchence was found dead. Tragic Heath Ledger occupies similar space in the same sad pantheon.

In death as in life, Michael Jackson was unique. I mean that in a peculiarly morbid way, as the raking over of his sudden demise is an indicator of how far news coverage has come in the 30-odd years since Elvis expired in Graceland.

Back then news was restricted to a handful of TV and radio bulletins. The next day newspaper front pages filled in the gaps. The story would run over several days, maybe even weeks, as more news emerged and details filtered out to the waiting world.

Now it's immediate, and constant. Watching initial reports of Jackson's death I was quietly appalled at how news coverage has evolved into a living, breathing beast. And its hunger is insatiable.

Thus Jackson, even more so than Diana, becomes the focus of a million camera lenses, all probing ever deeper into the last moments of a man who, some say, became the eccentric he was, due to living his entire life in the harsh glare of publicity. Such is the cloying nature of über celebrity.

Perhaps, post mortem, the real story of Michael Jackson will be told, though I doubt it. Already the conspiracy theories are growing, and truth (or what passes for it) is becoming enmeshed in confusion and obfuscation.

Two things are certain: Jackson's album sales will go through the roof (just like Lennon's in 1980) and someone, somewhere, is already prepping the TV movie of his life and death. I wonder who they'll get to play him…?