The Many Faces of Pete Burns
We all know the word "icon" is horribly overused, but it's still the best way to describe Pete Burns. Anything else would feel too small and restricting for the singer and reality star who defied easy categorisation but always made a massive impact. Seven years after his untimely death at the age of 57, clips from Burns' caustic 2006 stint on Celebrity Big Brother continue to circulate on social media. One stinging put-down – "you're insincere to the point of nausea", aimed at Baywatch actress Traci Bingham – has become a camp classic.
Artist and cabaret star Stephen Eyre aka Cassandra was 11 when they watched Burns on the show. They recall being "transfixed" by his "hilarious acid tongue" and "flamboyant yet staunch glamour", which is perhaps best encapsulated by the controversial fur coat he had confiscated by Big Brother. "I loved his feminine look with elements of masculine bolshiness," Cassandra says.
Celebrity Big Brother introduced Burns to a new audience when he was in his mid-forties, but he spent his entire adult life fronting the pioneering dance-pop group Dead or Alive. Their 1985 signature hit You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), which was produced by the then-fledgling Stock Aitken Waterman team, helped to take the pulsing, poppers-scented Hi-NRG sound out of underground gay clubs like Heaven and firmly into the mainstream. After a 17-week climb, You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) became Stock Aitken Waterman's first number one single and a key building block for future hits they made with Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley and Bananarama.
The song is such a stone-cold classic that it ended up defining Dead or Alive's career – following Burns' Celebrity Big Brother appearance, it re-entered the charts at number five. However, a glossy new box set, Still Spinnin': The Singles Collection, shines a spotlight on the group's many other gems. "Their catalogue is massively under-appreciated," says Mark Wood of The Readers Wifes, resident DJs at long-running LGBTQ+ club night Duckie. Wood cites follow-up singles In Too Deep (1985), Brand New Lover (1986) and Something in My House (1987) as prime examples of Burns' gift for "really smart lyrics" and gleaming pop melodies. "I think it's fair to say they got that Stock Aiken and Waterman sound out of Pete Waterman and co. before anyone else, so they were also trailblazers in a way," he says.
Burns was born and raised in Port Sunlight, a model village in Merseyside, and knew from a young age he was "different". He was a solitary child whose German mother, a glamorous woman who suffered with substance abuse and mental health issues, cultivated his rich imagination. Burns quit school at 14 after being reprimanded for turning up with red hair, one giant earring and no eyebrows, then got a job at Probe Records in Liverpool. Following his death, Probe customers shared stories of being served – or sometimes not – by Burns, who was already an imposing figure with a razor-sharp tongue. One punter who tried to buy a box set by punk band Half Japanese was told: "I'm not lettin' yer waste yer money on that shite." Another who asked for an album by Liverpool musician Julian Cope received the waspish response: "He's a prick but he's our prick. Go 'ead.'"
In 1977, he and Cope briefly played together in a punk four-piece called The Mystery Girls but Burns found his calling by fronting his own band, Nightmares in Wax. The lineup fluctuated as they evolved from punky goths into dance-pop lightning rods Dead or Alive, but Burns was always the focal point. When they smashed into the mainstream in the mid-1980s, he attracted plenty of attention for his flamboyant, androgynous appearance. For the band's debut appearance on Top of the Pops, when they performed their muscular 1984 cover of KC and the Sunshine Band's That's the Way (I Like It), Burns made a splash with massive crimped hair and a synched yellow bodysuit that left little to the imagination.
"There were gender-nonconforming artists years and years before him," says Mzz Kimberley, a singer and cabaret star who became friends with Burns in the early 1990s at London club night Kinky Gerlinky, "but Pete helped to continue with the dismantling of gender norms". For Mzz Kimberley, "what was so powerful [about Burns] was seeing a performer live their truth during a time when the LGBTQ+ community weren't given as much respect as they are now by mainstream society".
Still Spinnin’: The Singles Collection 1983-2021 is available now via Edsel.
Cassandra agrees, describing Burns aesthetically as "a child of David Bowie" who, along with Culture Club's Boy George, Soft Cell's Marc Almond and drag star Marilyn, helped to pass on "that sort of rarefied high-camp flamboyance" to a new generation of performers. Burns always claimed that the Culture Club singer had stolen his look, but the pair's sparring relationship was predicated on mutual respect. "I loved Pete Burns even when he disliked me because he was genius!" Boy George tweeted last year.
In 1989, Dead or Alive scored their last UK hit single (aside from a remake and then reissue of You Spin Me Round) with Come Home with Me Baby, a thumping paean to casual hook-ups. But the group, by now a two-piece comprising Burns and his longtime collaborator Steve Coy, who died in 2018, remained a major draw in Japan. Their soulful 1991 house banger Unhappy Birthday and rambunctious 1994 cover of Bowie’s Rebel Rebel, both of which appear on the box set, now sound like lost classics.
When Burns returned to the UK spotlight in the early 2000s, there was an almost voyeuristic focus on his appearance, which he had visibly altered with various cosmetic enhancements. "I've made myself what I want to be, not everybody's cup of tea," he told The Guardian in 2004. "And people wanna have a look at me. I fully accept that. People have always wanted to have a look at me." Burns' willingness to change his face with treatments and procedures was radical at the time, but in 2024, when a more overtly "surgeried" look has become fashionable in some celebrity circles, it does seem a little less extreme.
Burns was also ahead of his time in the way he perceived and spoke about gender and sexuality – essentially, the only label he ever wanted attached to him was Vivienne Westwood. He was married to a woman, Lynne Corlett, for 26 years until 2006, then entered into a short-lived civil-partnership with a man, Michael Simpson, which ended in 2008 after 10 months. "People always want to know – am I gay, bi, trans or what?" Burns wrote in his 2006 memoir, Freak Unique. "I say, forget all that. There's got to be a completely different terminology and I'm not aware if it's been invented yet. I'm just Pete."
Burns kept a lower public profile during the last few years of his life, partly as a result of health complications arising from botched cosmetic surgery, but Mzz Kimberley says his commitment to being himself never faltered. "Pete was Pete on stage and off – there was nothing fake about him," she says. "I remember the last time he came over before he died, he was walking around my neighbourhood owning his right to walk on this planet with ease and without ridicule. That confidence was inspiring." Wood enjoyed several nights out with Burns in the early noughties and says it was like "being in the same room as a beautiful tiger" – one who was "a bit scary" but also "very kind".
Though Burns is no longer with us, his influence looms large on the LGBTQ+ performance scene. The Vivienne, winner of RuPaul's Drag Race UK season one, chose him as one of her top five queer icons, while Dakota Schiffer, a season four contestant, portrayed him in the show's Snatch Game challenge. Cassandra says they can see shades of Burns' colourful presence in the work of Ms Sharon Le Grand, an "operative" cabaret performer with "a biting Liverpudlian wit". For Wood, Burns' legacy is simply too "precious" to forget. "People like him don't come along very often," he says. "Pete was clever, intimidating and an absolutely brilliant pop star." But in a way, Burns perhaps summed up his own queer appeal perfectly when he said in 2004: "I'm not the boy next door. If you want the boy next door, fucking go next door."
Still Spinnin’: The Singles Collection 1983-2021 is available now via Edsel.