Pete Burns, who has died of a heart attack aged 57, was the androgynous lead singer of Dead or Alive, the 1980s pop band best known for their international hit You Spin Me Round (Like a Record); he later found fame as a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother and, latterly, for his increasingly bizarre appearance, the result of his obsession with plastic surgery.
From his teenage years as a caustic, cackling punk on the Liverpool music scene in the 1980s to his final television appearance on Channel 5’s Celebrity Botched Up Bodies several weeks before his death, Burns defied categorisation and challenged those who pitied or sneered. The chaos, flamboyance and craven attention-seeking were matched by genuine eccentricity and intelligence. And despite bouts of depression and years of agony and ill health as the result of a botched lip filler operation, he appeared to be entirely lacking in self-pity. As he explained after the publication of his 2006 autobiography, Freak Unique, “I’m not thinking 'Why me?’ [but] 'Why NOT me?’ ”
Peter Jozzeppi Burns was born on August 5 1959 at Bebington, Cheshire, although the family later moved to Liverpool. His mother, Evelina Maria Bettina Quittner Von Hudec, was the daughter of a German Jew and had escaped Nazi Germany before the war. She met Burns’s father, Francis Burns, then a soldier, in Vienna, from where they returned together to Liverpool.
Burns’s relationship with his mother was extremely close, despite her spells of depression and alcoholism. But it was a solitary childhood, not helped by the fact that Pete only spoke German until he was five.
He left school in Liverpool at 14, having been reprimanded for dyeing his hair and wearing an earring, later recalling that at around this time he was also raped by a man who had picked him up in his car. “I thought I should have been upset about that,” wrote Burns. “But I wasn’t.”
Encouraged in his love of dressing-up by his mother, Burns began designing clothes and worked in a shop. He soon gravitated towards Liverpool’s burgeoning punk scene, which centred around Eric’s, a venue on Mathew Street run by the DJ and promoter Roger Eagle and frequented by many local aspiring young musicians, many of whom would go on to become a crucial part of the eighties music scene in bands such as The Mighty Wah!, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
Burns’s first band, The Mystery Girls, was a collaboration with the future stars Pete Wylie and Julian Cope. “Roger Eagle,” Burns later recalled, “just decided I should be in a group because I dressed up freaky.” They played one gig, supporting Sham 69, but immediately split up, “because Pete Wylie wanted to wear a toilet seat on his head.”
Burns’s next group was called Nightmares in Wax, but by 1982 they had changed their name to Dead or Alive and the following year they released the surprisingly mainstream and synthesised disco pop song You Spin Me Round. It became the first British No 1 for the pop producers Stock Aitken Waterman and sold in its millions all over the world.
“Pete Burns, Dead or Alive’s guiding spirit,” wrote one reviewer at the time, “brings a sort of mad vivacity to everything he does, and it almost compensates for his absence of singing ability.”
Burns’s early appearances on Top of the Pops showed him with a mane of thick black dreadlocks, and a black eye patch – but he did not embark on his obsessive relationship with surgery until after he became a pop star.
He never again repeated the success of You Spin Me Round, and although he spent many years touring, particularly in Japan, his next major brush with fame came with his appearance, in 2006, on Celebrity Big Brother. By then he was completely unrecognisable with blonde hair extensions and enhanced lips and cheeks. He delighted and outraged viewers in equal measures, performing a dance with the former MP George Galloway (both men wore leotards) and incurring the wrath of animal activists by wearing a monkey skin coat, which was removed from the studio by the police (“My f---ing coat is in police custody”).
In 2010 he released a solo single, Never Marry an Icon, but in December 2014 he was declared bankrupt and subsequently evicted from his flat.
Despite his appearance, Burns had a surprisingly unfeminine and deep voice, and his delight in shocking extended beyond his looks. He was notoriously – often hilariously – outspoken, highly articulate and unforgiving of those who smacked of weakness or conventionality. “I’m not the boy next door,” he explained. “If you want the boy next door, f---ing go next door.”
Nor was he, Burns said, a drag queen, and he always retained a certain masculinity. “Everyone’s in drag of some sorts,” he once said. “I don’t give a f--- about gender and drag.”
He married Lynne Corlett in 1980. They separated in 2006, after which he entered a civil partnership with Michael Simpson. They later also broke up although he remained close to both his ex-wife and ex-husband.
Pete Burns, born August 5 1959, died October 23 2016
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