Holographic Michael Jackson Performs At Billboard Music Awards

The King Of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, has proved the biggest talking-point so far of the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, with a holographic representation of the late icon performing the previously unreleased Slave To The Rhythm in front of the alternately uncomfortable and enthralled members of the audience.

There's no question that this sort of technology - a similar process was used by tech company Digital Domain Media Group to create Coachella 2012's revolutionary hologram of Tupac Shakur (before they went bankrupt) - is an incredible innovation, and watching how cleanly this rendition of Jacko moonwalks and gyrates and thrusts and sighs his (its?) way through the track, it's more than a little unsettling, as it was with Shakur, reconciling the model's realism with the fact that the man it is representing is very dead.

In other news to emerge from the awards, global darling Lorde has taken out the Top New Artist and Top Rock Song awards (the latter for Royals); Robin Thicke's ode to misogyny Blurred Lines managed to sleaze its way to taking out Top R&B Song honours; Katy Perry has been named Top Female Artist; and melodramatic hype machines Imagine Dragons scored Top Rock Album for the ubiquitous Night Visions.

Aussie teen heartthrobs 5 Seconds Of Summer made an early appearance to perform their popular cut She Looks So Perfect, with international TV announcers equating their "Australian invasion" with the kind of madness wrought by The Beatles at the peak of their career. It's easy to scoff until you hear the crowd.

The ceremony is currently under way - a full list of winners is being updated over at Billboard as results are released.