Pete Burns, androgynous pop singer

Pete Burns

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?’ ”

Pete Burns 

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.”

Burns in 2006 arriving at the Celebrity Big Brother House 

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.

Pete Burns in 2011 

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

Bobby Vee, clean-cut 1960s pop star

Bobby Vee 

BOBBY VEE, who has died aged 73, enjoyed a successful spell in the limelight in the early 1960s with a string of saccharine pop hits including Take Good Care of My Baby, Run To Him, The Night Has A Thousand Eyes and Rubber Ball.

With his infectious smile, bright eyes and boyish good looks, he swelled the ranks of other clean-cut American pop idols of the day such as Johnny Tillotson, Pat Boone and Bobby Rydell, taking advantage of the fact that Elvis Presley had been drafted into the US Army.

Another crucial factor in Vee’s rise to fame was the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and JP “The Big Bopper” Richardson on their way to play at a dance in Minnesota in February 1959. As 15-year-old Robert Velline he stepped in at three hours’ notice to take Holly’s place on stage at the Moorhead National Guard Armoury on the basis that he knew the words to Holly’s hit songs.

Within months, the young singer and his high school band, the Shadows, which included his older brother Bill on lead guitar, released their first record, Suzie Baby, on a local label in Minneapolis. Soon after it became a regional hit, he signed with Liberty Records.

Bobby Vee 

Renamed Bobby Vee, he went on to chart success on both sides of the Atlantic, topping the American charts in 1961 with the Carole King-Gerry Goffin song Take Care Good of My Baby and reaching No 2 in the US with the follow-up Run to Him. His UK breakthrough came when Run to Him received a unanimous thumbs-down on BBC Televison’s Juke Box Jury in January 1962, only for the record to vault to No 6 in the British Top Ten.

A month later, Take Care Good of My Baby was also released in Britain and reached No 7, boosted by Vee’s television and radio appearances and a hectic provincial tour starting at the Gaumont, Doncaster, with Tony Orlando and The Springfields. More record releases followed, most notably The Night Has A Thousand Eyes from the film Just For Fun which got to No 3 in Britain in March 1963.

A year later Vee was back in the UK for a 29-date tour with Dusty Springfield, The Searchers and Big Dee Irwin, and in June 1964, with the British pop invasion of the United States well under way, he toured America with the Rolling Stones and released an album of Merseybeat arrangements called Bobby Vee Sings The New Sound From England!

Bobby Vee 

In all he recorded 38 Top 100 hits between 1959 and 1970, before changing his style and image and releasing an album of country-inflected rock numbers called Nothing Like A Sunny Day (1972). By the mid-1980s he was a regular on the oldies touring circuit, appearing on a series of UK dates with Del Shannon and Rick Nelson.

The son of a chef and his Finnish wife, Robert Thomas Velline was born in Fargo, North Dakota, on April 30 1943, into a musical family. His American father played the violin and piano. Bobby formed his own band at Central High School in Fargo in 1958, and the following year answered an appeal on local radio for a group to fill in at a “Winter Dance Party” following Buddy Holly’s plane crash.

In the summer of 1959, when his career was beginning to take off, Bobby Vee was introduced to a teenage pianist calling himself Elston Gunnn and appeared with him at a couple of gigs. The musician’s real name was Robert Zimmerman, who switched to the folk guitar, renamed himself Bob Dylan, and who, in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, enthusiastically recalled Vee performing his own first recorded song Suzie Baby.

Bobby Vee 

Signed to the American label Liberty, Vee was groomed for stardom by the producer Thomas “Snuff” Garrett, who arranged for him to cover What Do You Want?, a big British hit for Adam Faith. Vee’s version flopped badly, struggling to No 93 in 1960, but he fared better with his follow-up Devil or Angel which got to No 6 in the American charts.

His next release, Rubber Ball, co-written with the singer Gene Pitney, became Vee’s first million-selling record. It climbed to No 6 in America in February 1961, but reached No 4 in Britain, even fending off a cover version by the better-known Marty Wilde. Vee’s follow-up single, More Than I Can Say, also charted in Britain at No 4 a few months later.

Perennially popular in Britain, where he toured regularly for years after his hit parade heyday, Vee numbered Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice among his fans and performed at Webber’s 50th birthday party in 1998. It was while touring in England that he first noticed symptoms of what was later diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease. Vee, who stopped performing in 2011, latterly recorded some of his favourite songs in a jam session with his family at their studio in Minnesota.

In 2013 Bob Dylan introduced Vee to the audience while playing a concert in Minnesota before performing his own version of Suzie Baby.

Bobby Vee married, in 1963, Karen Bergen. She predeceased him in 2015 and he is survived by their three children.

Bobby Vee, born April 30 1943, died October 24 2016

Jimmy Perry, co-creator of Dad's Army

Jimmy Perry (left) and David Croft after receiving their OBEs 

Jimmy Perry, who has died aged 93, created and co-wrote, with David Croft, the BBC situation comedy Dad’s Army, which he based on his wartime experiences in the Home Guard, and which became one of the most popular and best-loved shows on television.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he also collaborated with Croft on other popular sitcoms including It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum Hi-de-Hi! and You Rang, M’Lord?

Perry, the extrovert of the pair, invariably drew on personal experience: having served in the Home Guard as a teenager, he joined the  wartime regular Army, was posted to Burma with the Royal Artillery and joined his unit’s concert party, which inspired It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

Demobbed, he trained as an actor and spent his holidays working as a Butlin’s Redcoat, stints that later yielded material for Hi-de-Hi! (1980-1988) which, after a slow start, caught on, to the dismay of Butlins who had spent 20 years trying to bury their end-of-the-pier image. Curiously, though, Fred Pontin, Britain’s other holiday camp king, loved the show.

For more than a quarter of a century, Perry worked in what he called the “middle-class, rather snobbish environment” of the BBC. “I’m ashamed to admit it,” he remarked in his memoirs, “but it suited me down to the ground.” The Perry-Croft formula included an ensemble cast, a fixed setting, a range of characters of all ages, types and classes, an unflinching portrayal of human frailty and – above all – a genuine affection for their subjects.

The partnership dominated the BBC’s prime-time comedy schedules for 20 years, a feat unmatched by any other scriptwriting team.

The main cast of Dad's Army in 1971 (l-r)Clive Dunn, John Le Mesurier, Ian Lavender, James Beck, John Laurie, Arnold Ridley, Arthur Lowe  

Perry had the idea for Dad’s Army while travelling on a suburban London train, wrote a one-off script, and in 1966, while appearing in an episode of Beggar My Neighbour as an actor, showed it to the producer, David Croft, who pitched it to BBC management.

Reaction at Television Centre was initially hostile, with grave reservations being expressed about satirising Britain’s Finest Hour, and at least one department head calling it “absolutely mad”, but eventually Perry and Croft won the argument. Casting the series in 1967, Perry struggled to persuade the BBC’s Head of Comedy, Michael Mills, to give the part of Captain Mainwaring to Arthur Lowe, then a regular in ITV’s Coronation Street. Eventually Mills agreed, and also came up with the series title Dad’s Army – which Perry had to confess was a huge improvement on his original one, The Fighting Tigers.

Dad's Army 40th anniversary photocall in 2008: (standing l-r)  Frank Williams, Ian Lavender, Clive Dunn, Jeff Holland, Harold Snoad, David Croft, Donald Hewlitt, Eric Longworth, Jimmy Perry, Pamela Cundell (in sidecar) and Bill Pertwee on his original motorbike from the series  

Perry and Croft wrote the scripts together, one with a pencil writing it down, the other pacing the room. Halfway through a scene, the pencil was passed from one to the other. Rehearsals were fraught; the actor John Le Mesurier (playing the languid Sergeant Wilson) declared that the new show was a shambles. “It’s absolutely appalling, it can’t possibly work,” he told Barry Took. “No, no, my dear boy, it’s an absolute disaster.”

But when the programme made its debut in July 1968, seven million viewers tuned in, and the critics loved it. In The Sunday Telegraph, Philip Purser thought that Perry and Croft’s characterisations had been “maturing over a dozen years and in some of the greatest cellars in comedy”. By late 1972 more than 16 million were watching. The show ran to 64 episodes and became a mainstay of the BBC schedules for nine years; thanks to countless repeats, it has long since become a classic. 

Perry’s famous “Don’t tell him, Pike!” scene was repeatedly voted the funniest in television history, and in several polls the series ranked as Britain’s favourite comedy. “Of all the cultural success stories of the late 1960s,” noted the historian Dominic Sandbrook, “Dad’s Army was not only one of the most unexpected, but one of the most enduring.”

Jimmy Perry (right) and David Croft with Goldie Horne at a Writers' Guild of Great Britain awards ceremony in 1970James Perry was born on September 20 1923 at Barnes, south-west London, into a prosperous middle-class family; his father, who ran an antiques shop at South Kensington, was a founder of the British Antique Dealers’ Association.

His happy childhood teemed with characters and catchphrases he would later incorporate into his scripts: his father, for one, balefully noting his son’s early passion for the entertainment world, would chide him with “you stupid boy”, a phrase that became Captain Mainwaring’s admonition to Private Pike in Dad’s Army. Perry based Pike’s character on himself as a teenage mummy’s boy, noting that although his own mother never made him actually wear a scarf, “she came pretty near”.

Young Jimmy’s grandfather – who had attended the last public execution in Britain – had been a butler at a grand house in Belgrave Square, and his stories were the basis of You Rang, M’Lord? (1988-1993). The Perry family’s daily woman, Mabel, was the model for the charlady in the same show.

After leaving St Paul’s School aged 14, Jimmy was sent to secretarial college, but having truanted for the whole of one summer, reading Tarzan books on Barnes Common instead of attending classes, he became apprenticed in the carpet department of Waring and Gillow’s in Oxford Street. The outbreak of war put paid to his career as a salesman, however, and his family moved to live above his uncle’s antiques shop at Watford.

It was there that Perry served in the Home Guard, joining the Watford company of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment. Among the motley recruits was the original Lance Corporal Jones, an elderly French polisher (rather than a butcher, as in Dad’s Army) who had served in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. When a local professional comedian saw Perry telling jokes on stage at the Gaumont Cinema, he invited him to join a concert party.

Although, at his mother’s insistence, Perry delayed his conscription by working at a munitions factory, in late 1943 he was called up and joined the First (Mixed) Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment of the Royal Artillery at Oswestry. His success as a member of the camp concert party meant that the regimental colonel kept him away from the D-Day landings, but later in 1944, after an altercation with a captain at the base, Perry was posted to the Far East and sent first to Bombay and then on to Burma, being promoted en route from gunner to bombardier.

Cast of It Ain't Half Hot Mum in 1982, including Windsor Davies (holding stick), Don Estelle (smallest) and Mervyn Hayes (2nd Right)

He eventually found himself in the concert party attached to the Royal Artillery base in the famed former mental hospital at Deolali. His time there, and a subsequent stint with Combined Services Entertainment – under the gimlet eye of a regimental sergeant-major who regarded the entire troupe as “a bunch of poofs” – later inspired It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-1981).

Although now considered politically incorrect, with its portrayal of Indian “natives” and guying of gays, Perry and Croft considered this the funniest of their collaborations.

When, on his return to England, Perry failed to get a booking at the Windmill Theatre, in 1947 he enrolled at Rada with Warren Mitchell, Lionel Jeffries and Dorothy Tutin, also taking summer jobs as a Redcoat at Butlin’s at Pwllheli, north Wales, the inspiration for Hi-de-Hi! 

Ruth Madoc in Hi Di Hi 

Having turned down the offer of a permanent job from Billy Butlin in person, from 1950 Perry worked as an actor in weekly rep and in West End musicals. In the early 1960s he returned to Watford as actor-manager at the town’s repertory theatre, where he became a familiar figure in heavy checked tweeds, Inverness cape and deerstalker hat. When he joined Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at Stratford, east London, Perry found himself thinking about developing a television sitcom and remembered his experiences in the Home Guard.

Working apart from Croft, Perry had less success, with two ITV sitcoms, Room Service (1979) – about hotels – and High Street Blues (1989) – about supermarkets – proving instant flops, both arguably contending for the title of worst British sitcom ever.

He composed the signature tunes of all his hit comedy series, most notably that of Dad’s Army, for which he wrote Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler? Sung by Bud Flanagan, it won the Ivor Novello award for best television signature tune in 1971.

With David Croft, Perry received the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award for best comedy script for three consecutive years between 1969 and 1971, and won a Bafta award for best television episode in 1971 for Dad’s Army. He won the guild’s lifetime achievement award in 1995 and the Comic Heritage Award in 1998.

Perry was appointed OBE in 1978. His autobiography, A Stupid Boy, appeared in 2002. In 1990 he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, but given the all clear after surgery. David Croft died in September 2011 aged 89.

In 1953 Jimmy Perry married the actress Gilda Neeltje. He is survived by his partner, the costume designer Mary Husband.

Jimmy Perry, born September 20 1923, died October 23 2016

Dave Cash, pioneering Radio 1 DJ

Dave Cash at home in 1972 

Dave Cash, who has died aged 74, was one of the original disc jockeys on the BBC’s pop network Radio 1 when it was launched in 1967.

In a line-up featuring star DJs like Tony Blackburn, Ed Stewart and Jimmy Young, Cash hosted several different daily record shows and for a time was ranked among Swinging London’s most eligible bachelors, being photographed at trendy night spots with glamorous models and in powerful Aston Martin cars.

Dropped from the Radio 1 roster in April 1970, he was billed as the network’s first casualty of the controversial BBC policy document Broadcasting in the Seventies, which reduced the station’s hours and finally separated it from Radio 2.

Cash resurfaced three years later as a member of the launch team on Capital Radio, London’s first commercial pop station, working as production director and a presenter alongside Kenny Everett, the madcap DJ with whom he had worked on the pirate station Radio London during the 1960s, and reviving their popular anarchic Kenny and Cash Show.

Kenny Everett (left) and Dave Cash in 1968

Tony Blackburn described Cash as a Walter Mitty-like character “full of big ideas that never seemed to come to fruition”, and who repeatedly boasted of a multimillion dollar deal he was about to sign with a major American network. But in the early 1990s, Cash surprised his critics with the success of his first novel, The Rating Game (1991), a steamy tale of boardroom intrigue set against a background of commercial radio in the 1980s.

He followed this in 1993 with All Night Long, based on his experiences with the pirate operator Radio London in the 1960s, and in 1995 King Of Clubs, a political thriller set in Romania during the overthrow of its communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu.

The only child of a psychiatric nurse and his wife, also a nurse, he was born David Charles Wish on July 18 1942 at Bushey, Hertfordshire, and grew up in north London, but in 1946, when he was four, his parents emigrated to Canada. At the age of 11 David returned to Britain on a scholarship to the Royal Hospital School near Ipswich, after which he served with the Merchant Navy in Canada, an experience that left him with the North American accent he would retain all his life.

In 1963, while working as a copywriter for a Vancouver menswear shop, Cash seized his chance to appear on the city’s CFUN radio station when an actor booked to record a commercial voice-over called in sick. Restyling himself Dave Cash after the American singer Johnny Cash, he stepped in and three weeks later was contracted for more commercials and offered shifts as a disc jockey. When a friend wired him from Britain about the launch of pirate radio, Cash hastened back to London.

Although he had intended to apply to Radio Caroline, he chanced to run into Ben Toney, the Texan programme director of the rival station Radio London, who in December 1964 took him on as an afternoon DJ and commercial writer. Once on board a rusting former American minesweeper renamed MV Galaxy anchored three-and-a-half miles off the Essex coast at Frinton-on-Sea, he collaborated with a 19-year-old trainee from Liverpool called Maurice Cole, better known as Kenny Everett, on the Kenny and Cash Show.

With Radio London and other pirate radio stations under threat of imminent closure from the British government, Cash joined Radio Luxembourg before moving to the old BBC Light Programme in 1966. The following year a successful audition with Robin Scott, the first controller of Radio 1, led to his being awarded a midday slot on the new pop station, followed by a subsequent move to early evening drive-time, and a popular Sunday show Cash at Four.

In 1969 Cash was behind a Top 30 entry of his own, the novelty single Groovy Baby, featuring Microbe, a character from his radio show who was actually the gurgling three-year-old son of a BBC colleague .

Following his departure from Radio 1, Cash settled at Capital Radio in 1973 and remained there for 21 years. As well as reviving the Kenny and Cash Show, he hosted a lunchtime quiz competition Cash on Delivery and several weekend programmes for the station’s oldies service Capital Gold. Following the success of his first novel The Rating Game, he left Capital in 1994 to concentrate on writing.

In the late 1960s Cash hosted episodes of Top of the Pops on BBC Television. He supplied the voice-over in The Who’s cult film hit Quadrophenia in 1979 and took a cameo role alongside Dennis Hopper in the sci-fi comedy The American Way (1986). By then he had become programme controller of Radio West, the commercial station based in Bristol, when it was launched in 1981.

Dave Cash in 2010

In 1999 Cash returned to the BBC, working in local radio across the south of England, broadcasting weekend shows of rock classics and country and western tracks on Radios Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Solent, Berkshire and Oxford. His recollections of life aboard a pirate radio ship, He Sounds Much Taller, appeared as an audio book in 2012.

Dave Cash was married three times. His first marriage, to Dawn in 1968, was short-lived, and in 1973 he married the actress Monica Evans, best known for playing Cecily Pigeon in the stage and film versions of Neil Simon’s comedy The Odd Couple. They divorced in 2010 and the following year he married Sara Davies, who worked on his Radio Kent show as “Emily Email” on account of her role answering listeners’ queries. She survives him with a daughter and a son of his second marriage.

Dave Cash, born July 18 1942, died October 21 2016