Pete Burns

Pete Burns
Peter Jozzeppi Burns (5 August 1959 – 23 October 2016) was an English singer, songwriter and television personality. Often referred to as the "King of Punk", he formed the band Dead or Alive in 1980 and acted as the band's lead vocalist and principal songwriter. Their debut album, Sophisticated Boom Boom, was released in 1984, producing a series of minor hits in the United Kingdom, most notably their version of "That's the Way (I Like It)" (originally recorded by KC and the Sunshine Band) which gave the band their first UK top 40 hit.
Their second album, Youthquake (1985), reached the UK top 10 and brought the band international recognition, largely due to the success of the lead single, "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" which reached number one on the UK Singles Chart and number 11 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in 1985. The album also contained three other UK top 40 hits: "Lover Come Back to Me", "In Too Deep", and "My Heart Goes Bang (Get Me to the Doctor)". The band's third album, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, was released in 1986, scoring several further hit singles including "Brand New Lover", "Something in My House", "Hooked on Love" and "I'll Save You All My Kisses".
In December 2016, Billboard ranked Dead or Alive as the 96th most successful "dance artist" of all time and they are estimated to have sold over 50 million records and 28 million singles worldwide. Burns continued to achieve further celebrity status in the British media following his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother 4, in which he finished in fifth place. He appeared on further television reality shows, including as a presenter. He was known for his ever-changing (and often androgynous) appearance, which he freely admitted was greatly modified by cosmetic surgery that eventually bankrupted him and caused health problems later in his life.
Early life
Pete Burns was born on 5 August 1959 in Port Sunlight, Cheshire. Burns' mother, Evelina von Hudec, was German-born (Heidelberg) and, according to Burns' autobiography, her first marriage was to a German Freiherr. As her father was Jewish, she moved to Vienna to escape the Nazis. At a tea dance in Vienna, she met an English soldier from Liverpool named Francis Burns. Burns later wrote of his childhood in his autobiography in which he described his mother's alcoholism and suicide attempts but maintained that she was "absolutely the best mother in the world":
Burns spoke German until he was 5-years-old, which resulted in local children spending days outside his house shouting "Heil Hitler". According to Burns, school was "almost non-existent", and his mother frequently kept him away so he could spend the day with her. He was thrown out of school at 13 after being summoned to the headmaster's office because he had arrived at school with "no eyebrows, Harmony-red hair, and one gigantic earring". At this age, Burns was raped by a man who drove him to Raby Mere and threatened him with an air gun.
Career
Early career and band formation
Burns did not have ambitions to be a singer. He said that he hated the sound of his voice, and wished he had been able to sing falsetto like Sylvester. He had an uncomfortable relationship with the corporate music industry, and expressed disgust at the way it functioned. He always refused to allow record company staff to hear his music before it was completed, which "didn't make [the executives] very pleased".
In 1977, Burns formed a band with contemporaries Julian Cope, Pete Wylie, and Phil Hurst, calling themselves The Mystery Girls. They only had one performance (opening for Sham 69 at Eric's in Liverpool in November 1977) before disintegrating. Cope stated that Burns's performing style drew on that of the transgender punk performer Wayne County. Burns continued in early-1979 with a new band, Nightmares in Wax, featuring a gothic post-punk sound, with backing from keyboardist Martin Healy, guitarist Mick Reid, bassist Rob Jones (who left soon afterwards to be replaced by Walter Ogden), and drummer Paul Hornby (who also exited soon after the band's formation to be replaced by Phil Hurst).
The group played their first gig supporting Wire at Eric's in July 1979, and recorded demos which included a cover of the Simon Dupree and the Big Sound song "Kites", a feature of their early shows. Although signed to the Eric's Records label, their only release, a three-track 7-inch EP entitled Birth of a Nation, appeared in March 1980 on Inevitable Records. A 12-inch single featuring two of the tracks from the EP, "Black Leather" and "Shangri-La", was released in 1985. The EP featured "Black Leather", which halfway through turned into K.C. & the Sunshine Band's "That's the Way (I Like It)".
The band went through several line-up changes over the next three years while recording a series of independent singles. In 1980, after replacing several members, Burns changed the band's name to Dead or Alive. Dead or Alive'''s singles started charting on the UK Indie Chart, beginning with 1982's "The Stranger" reaching No. 7. This prompted major label Epic Records to sign the band in 1983. Their first release for Epic was the single "Misty Circles", which appeared at No. 100 on the major UK Singles Chart in 1983. Two more singles, "What I Want" and "I'd Do Anything", attracted club play, but mainstream success continued to elude the band. The band's debut album, Sophisticated Boom Boom, was released in May 1984 and featured their first Top 40 UK single, "That's the Way (I Like It)", a remake of the 1975 hit by KC and the Sunshine Band. The single peaked at No. 22 in the UK and the album at No. 29.
Chart success
The band released its second album Youthquake in May 1985, produced by the then-fledgling production team of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman, known as Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW). Recording of the first single "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" was plagued by arguments between the band and producers, but became the band's only song to reach No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart after lingering outside the Top 40 for over two months. The song also proved to be SAW's first chart-topping single. The track also hit No. 11 in the US and No. 1 in Canada. Other album tracks released as singles included "Lover Come Back To Me", "In Too Deep", and "My Heart Goes Bang" which all reached the UK Top 30.
In late-1986, Dead or Alive released their third album, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know. Production of the album was marred by more fights between the band and SAW, with the latter frustrated by the band's refusal to branch into House music, and Burns being unwilling to hand over songwriting duties to the producers. Burns expressed frustration with his record company's reluctant attitude towards his single choices, complaining the label only relented on scheduling "Brand New Lover" for release after Bananarama had a hit with their Dead or Alive-inspired cover of "Venus", and alleging they also refused to give "Something In My House" a Halloween release date. A fight over mixes for the album's third single, "Hooked On Love" escalated to such a degree that Burns refused to film a video, accusing the label of "fucking up" the release.
The lead single "Brand New Lover" became a modest UK hit, peaking at No. 31, but was more successful in the US where it reached No. 15 on the US Hot 100, and No. 1 on the US Billboard dance chart. Burns blamed the relative underperformance of the single in the UK on the record company's failure to press and distribute enough copies of the single to meet customer demand. Three more singles from the album were released, the most successful in the UK was "Something in My House". A highly controversial 12-inch white label mix, known as "Naughty XXX", was released to club DJs, featuring a series of stronger dialogue clips from The Exorcist – with the track described as "unique" in its capacity as the only known example of a "filthy, obscene [and] sexually explicit" Stock Aitken Waterman record. A third single, "Hooked on Love", failed to make the UK Top 40 amid Burns' battle with the label over their refusal to prioritise his preferred mix, which featured a "Gothic" overtone.
After the release of the album, Tim Lever and Mike Percy left the band to form careers as mixers and producers. The pair owned and operated Steelworks Studios in Sheffield. Lever and Percy experienced success writing and mixing songs for acts like S Club 7, Blue, and Robbie Williams. Lever and Percy have since left the studio, with the former being now a guitar luthier. In 1987, Dead or Alive released their greatest hits album Rip It Up, and a concert tour of the same name with dates in Europe, the United States, and Japan.
Film footage was recorded at two shows at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan on 9 October and at Osaka's Osaka-jō Hall on 11 October 1987, and released on video cassette (VHS) and Laserdisc that same year under the title Rip It Up Live. During this time, Burns turned down an offer to tour with Madonna for her Who's That Girl World Tour to be with his mother when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died shortly afterward. In mid-1988, Dead or Alive, now pared down to a duo of Burns and Coy, released the self-produced Nude, which featured the single "Turn Around and Count 2 Ten". It was followed by "Come Home with Me Baby" which was a US club hit, reaching No. 1 on the US dance charts.
1990s and 2000s
In 1990, the band produced their next studio album, Fan the Flame (Part 1), although their only successful record deal was in Japan. The band had begun to produce Fan the Flame (Part 2), however the album was shelved until it was finished in 2021. Some tracks were later re-recorded for the band's 1995 Nukleopatra album which was the band's sixth and final studio album. In 2000, Dead or Alive released Fragile, a collection of remakes with several new tracks and covers including U2's "Even Better Than the Real Thing" and Nick Kamen's "I Promised Myself". A new remix album, Unbreakable, was released in 2001. This was followed by a greatest hits album entitled Evolution: the Hits; both of them enjoyed, for the first time since Nude, a UK release, with "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" re-entering the Top 40.
Solo music career and collaborations
In the mid-1990s, Burns collaborated with the Italian Eurodance duo Glam to produce the single "Sex Drive", which was later re-recorded for Dead or Alive's sixth studio album Nukleopatra. In 2004, Burns enjoyed solo success with the Pet Shop Boys-produced track "Jack and Jill Party". The track reached No. 75 in the UK singles chart. On 7 September 2010, Burns's solo single "Never Marry an Icon", produced and co-written by the Dirty Disco, was released to the iTunes Store. The single was released by fellow Dead or Alive member Steve Coy's label, Bristar Records. Burns's final musical appearance was on Big Brother's Bit on the Side, where he sang "You Spin Me Round". His last public appearance itself was on Celebrity Botched Up Bodies in September 2016.
Media career
In December 2003, the BBC apologised to its viewers after Burns swore once on its pre-9pm watershed Liquid News show when asked about his views on the Michael Jackson trial. Burns also appeared in the first episode of the ninth series of the UK version of Celebrity Wife Swap. His partner Michael Simpson went to live with former Page 3 model Leah Newman, while Burns lived with Newman's partner, the footballer Neil Ruddock. Burns was featured in a documentary, with a medium, exploring his rough and harmful childhood.
In January 2006, Burns appeared on Channel 4's Celebrity Big Brother 4, eventually reaching fifth on the show's final episode. It was on this show that he declared that one of his coats was made out of gorilla fur – this caused outrage amongst animal rights activists and unlicensed gorilla fur is illegal in the United Kingdom. Police subsequently confiscated the coat and tests were performed on it that revealed that it was not gorilla, but was made out of the fur of colobus monkeys. Colobus monkeys are also an endangered species whose fur requires a licence, although experts believed that the fur had been imported in the 1930s, before it became illegal to import colobus fur in 1975.
Personal life
Relationships
Burns married Lynne Corlett in Liverpool on 8 August 1980 after he met Corlett in a hair salon where they both worked. Discussing the wedding, Burns said: "The only thing that spoiled it was that the man in the registry office had to go and make a feeble joke by asking which one of us was the bride". They divorced in 2006 and Burns entered a civil partnership with his partner Michael Simpson shortly afterward in 2007.
On the topic of his sexuality, Burns stated, "[People] always want to know – am I gay, bi, trans or what? 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." He also said that he always identified himself as male and never had intentions of being a woman: "It freaks me that someone could think I was a woman. Don't get me wrong – I love women; I love men, too, and I'm very proud to be a man."
Surgery and health
Burns was known for his addiction to cosmetic surgery. Burns had extensive polyacrylamide injections into his lips, cheek implants, several rhinoplasties and many tattoos. In early-2006, Burns revealed in an interview that he had spent most of his life savings on 18 months of reconstructive surgery after a cosmetic procedure on his lips went wrong. In January 2007, he announced that he was planning to sue the cosmetic surgeon, Maurizio Viel, who performed his faulty lip surgery, for £1 million. Surgery-related health problems experienced by Burns included pulmonary embolisms and near-fatal blood clots. In March 2009, Burns was admitted to a London hospital after collapsing from a kidney ailment. He was diagnosed with seven large kidney stones, which were removed with laser surgery.
Legal issues
Paparazzi followed Burns around after his arrest for assault in 2006 (the charges were later dropped) and his attempts to revive his career premiered in the documentary Pete Burns Unspun on Living TV. Burns was declared bankrupt in December 2014 and was evicted from a rented flat in April 2015 for non-payment of over £34,000 in rent.
Death and funeral
Burns died in London following a sudden cardiac arrest on 23 October 2016, at the age of 57. In May 2016, Burns had previously sparked concerns when he was seen in public appearing bloated and dishevelled. People who paid tribute to him after his death included Boy George, who described Burns as "one of our great true eccentrics", Marc Almond, who described Burns as a "one off creation, a fabulous, fantastic, brilliant creature" and former MP George Galloway, who had appeared with him on Celebrity Big Brother and said Burns was "a cross between Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker... you don't get more brilliant than that".
On 29 October, the opening celebrity dance routine for BBC's Strictly Come Dancing'' was performed to "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)". After the number, hosts Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly paid tribute to Burns and sent their condolences to his family. Boy George paid for the costs of Burns' funeral, despite the two artists' rivalry during their parallel music careers. Burns at one time accused Boy George of appropriating his unique image.
Published works
Books
Solo discography
Singles
References
Sources
External links
"Where Are They Now?" from the BBC
1959 births
2016 deaths
English pop singers
English new wave musicians
British hi-NRG musicians
British synth-pop new wave musicians
English male singer-songwriters
English singer-songwriters
Dead or Alive (band) members
20th-century English male singers
21st-century English male singers
Epic Records artists
English bisexual people
English LGBT songwriters
English LGBT singers
Bisexual songwriters
Bisexual male musicians
Bisexual singers
Male-to-female cross-dressers
Male new wave singers
Musicians from Cheshire
Musicians from Merseyside
Singers from Cheshire
Singers from Merseyside
People from Bebington
English autobiographers
English expatriates in Japan
Scouse culture of the early 1980s
English people of German-Jewish descent
English people of Scottish descent
English baritones
People known for their body modification
20th-century English LGBT people
21st-century English LGBT people
Eyepatch wearers