Michael had this ritual every time we said goodbye," recalls Tito Jackson, from beneath his trademark bowler hat. "All of us brothers would hug and tell each other we loved each other, but Michael's favourite thing was to say, 'I love you more' and that night was no different."
The night in question, at a restaurant in the Jackson family's adopted city of Los Angeles, was the 60th wedding anniversary of Joseph Jackson and his wife, Katherine. "The entire family was there," says Tito. "We just talked and took pictures and shared ideas and caught up with what we'd all been doing. It was a very happy night. Michael was full of life and full of spirit, and he was just getting ready to start enjoying his life again.
"He was going to buy another place, as he was sick of Neverland. He wanted to start doing movies and just take it easy and be with his children."
The following month, on 25 June 2009, Michael Jackson had a heart attack in bed at his mansion in LA. After his death, an autopsy ruled that the sedative Lorazepam and the powerful anaesthetic Propofol found in the 50-year-old performer's blood were primarily responsible for Jackson's premature death. On 8 February 2010, his doctor Conrad Murray was charged with involuntary manslaughter.
At the time of writing, the resulting trial was nearing its conclusion, but whatever the outcome, the process hasn't produced emotional closure for Jackson's relatives.
"I don't think there will ever be closure for our family," admits Tito, who is in London this week for the world premiere of a documentary on Jackson, The Life of an Icon. It has been produced by David Gest, concert promoter and longstanding friend of the Jackson family.
"I'm not a doctor but whether he knew better or Michael knew better he shouldn't have been doing that. He's a doctor. He's in charge. He's taken an oath and at that time he should have been doing what he needed to do to get my brother straight, not contributing to the situation.
"The world has lost a great man, but for our family it has nothing to do with music. To lose your brother, someone that you've known all your life and loved all your life and to know what happened to him …" Tito trails off.
Regardless of his legal culpability, for Tito at least, Conrad Murray represents a type of person who began to contaminate his brother's life as his popularity peaked in 1982 with the release of the album Thriller.
"I thought he would be able to handle it," says Tito, of the pernicious celebrity that accompanied Michael's success. "And to start with he did handle it very well, but he was put in a position that no one's been put in, and the problems came when a whole lot of other people got involved more and his family got involved less. That's when the trouble started."
The film suggests that the second-degree burns Michael suffered to his scalp on the set of a Pepsi commercial on 27 January 1984, when faulty pyrotechnics accidentally set his hair alight, were pivotal in his physical and psychological deterioration.
The incident, and resulting rhinoplasty, triggered a spiralling addiction to painkillers and plastic surgery.
By the time 13-year-old Jordan Chandler went public with accusations of sexual abuse – eventually settled out of court – against Jackson in 1993, stories of sleeping in an oxygen chamber, adopting chimpanzee companions and wild financial excesses had already corroded his reputation. Despite his acquittal from further child sex abuse charges in 2005, Jackson never regained the effervescent verve that had propelled him to such stratospheric musical heights in the late 70s and early 80s.
"All of that had something to do with where he was with his career, his life, the whole thing," agrees Tito.
"Divide and conquer," he continues, "that's what happened to Michael. Purely in the interests of financial greed, people in the business – and we're talking lawyers, managers, all kinds of people – wanted to divide him from his brothers.
"Michael's problem, just like his mother, is that he trusted people too much. He really did. He trusted too much and was taken advantage of.
"We tried to reach him but the people round him made it very difficult. When he got into trouble a few times they all ran – and when he was exonerated they all came back."
Tito's exasperation is palpable and his measured baritone bristles: "Am I still angry about it? I'm fucking furious. It makes me feel like shit how people wanted to use him. As a family we did try to help him but although Michael knew who these people were, and tried to keep them at arm's length, he didn't see everything because he was too close to it. I could see that these people were there for the wrong reasons, but I couldn't run Michael's life for him. But if I'd known then how tragically this journey would end, I wouldn't have taken it.
"I'd give it all up to have my brother here with me now. I'd do anything to have my brother with me."
One of nine Jackson children, Tito was born five years before Michael on 15 October 1953 and remembers his brother as a child: "He was always different. He was the little one that always used to suck his finger. He sucked it so much I thought he was going to have buck teeth, but his personality was different too. He was like a grown man in a little man's body. My brothers and I, we'd go to a city and were more interested in seeing the stadium where the New York Giants played – Michael would want to meet the politicians or see the local history. He was always a heavy reader and always interested in other countries' cultures."
As the family's musical talent blossomed, marshalled militarily by their steel-worker father, Joseph, so did the brothers' more playful side. "We laughed to keep our sanity and Marlon and Michael, my two little diddy brothers, when they were nine or 10, used to love to go to New York and fill balloons with water then drop them on people from above. We were just normal boys having fun."
Normality for the Jackson brothers who were to become the all-conquering Jackson 5 – Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael – entailed four hours of after-school rehearsals, a 90-minute round trip to an evening gig, homework, then eventually bed between 2am and 4am.
The schedule was relentless and in 1993, speaking to Oprah Winfrey, Michael admitted that he was physically and emotionally abused by his father during rehearsals and that he would often vomit at the sight of his father.
The public picture of Joseph as a bullying tyrant is not one Tito accepts. "To pull off what he pulled off, how he pulled it off, where he comes from, where his family was born from, I think my father is one of the greatest men that ever lived."
Tito strongly denies accusations that Joseph's authoritarian regime contributed to Michael's emotional acquiescence and eventual retreat from conventional adult life. "I'm pretty sure that everybody at some time in their life has a few words with their pop, but the difference between the Jackson family and other families is that it gets written about. The relationship we've got with our father is not different at all."
After Michael's death, his mother Katherine, now 81, became the legal guardian of his son Prince, 14, and daughter Paris, 13, from his second marriage to former nurse Debbie Rowe, and nine-year-old Blanket, conceived via artificial insemination by a still anonymous surrogate mother.
"My mother is still a very strong lady," says Tito, "so they're in good hands. If you've been watching the court case you can see she's got her wits about her. We're there every day, and they have a lot of cousins the same age to hang out with so it helps them to know their family is around them."
Inevitably, Michael's death has also brought the rest of the family closer together. "We've always been tight but we're tighter than ever now. We're closer than people could ever imagine, but the hole that Michael has left will never be filled.
"Everyone has their perception of who my brother was and he was just a person that loved life, loved seeing people happy and loved making a difference through his music. It's not for me to say how much of a difference he made, but I don't think I could have asked for a better brother."
• Michael Jackson: The Life of an Icon is out on DVD
