Pete Burns

Peter Jozzeppi Burns (5 August 1959 – 23 October 2016) was an English singer, songwriter and television personality.

Burns formed the band Dead or Alive in 1980 during the new wave era and was the band's lead vocalist. Dead or Alive sold over 17 million albums and 36 million singles worldwide; their 1985 hit "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" became their first UK No. 1 hit single. The band had seven UK Top 40 singles, two US Top 20 singles and another two singles which went to No. 1 on the US Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart. In 2016, Billboard magazine ranked Dead or Alive as one of the most successful dance artists of all time.

Burns also released his own music as a solo artist, collaborated with other musicians, and appeared on television in reality shows. He received attention in the British media following his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother 4, finishing in fifth place.

Burns was noted for his powerful, deep baritone voice along with his flamboyant dress style, eyepatch, and androgynous gender bender appearance. Though he avoided labelling himself, and despite the fact that he was married to a woman during the height of his fame, Burns has been referred to as a gay icon and an individual who helped bring gay music into mainstream popularity. Burns was also notable for his many cosmetic surgeries.

Early life

Burns was born the younger of two children on 5 August 1959, in Port Sunlight, Wirral. Burns's mother, Evelina Maria Bettina Quittner Von Hudec, was born in Heidelberg, Germany, and, according to his 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. Until he was 5, Burns spoke only German which resulted in local children spending days outside his house shouting "Heil Hitler". From a young age, Burns developed a penchant for wearing costumes and he became obsessed with Native American culture going so far as to wear an Indian headdress constantly along with having his mother put up a tepee at his school playground. By his own admission, Burns was a lonely child who preferred drawing and painting to interacting with other children.

Burns stated that he inherited his love of fashion from his mother: "She'd do five costume changes a day and had a real thing about make-up. Every day at 5:30 a.m., she'd barricade herself into the front room and do her face." Burns also later described his mother's alcoholism, drug addiction, and multiple suicide attempts which were the result of her having suffered a nervous breakdown when she learned the fate of her family members during World War II. However, he maintained that she was "absolutely the best mother in the world" despite the child abuse he experienced:

I lived, I know now, a very solitary childhood. I had nothing to compare it with, so it seemed fine to me. I rarely left the house. I didn't need to; I had a secret world I shared with my mother. In those early years, I couldn't possibly have wished for a better friend. [...] She gave me the power to dream, the power to remove myself from where I might not be having any fun, and go inside my head and be somewhere else.

For Burns, school was "almost non-existent", and his mother frequently kept him away so he could spend the day with her. Burns was also endlessly taunted by teachers and peers, before being thrown out of school at 14 after being summoned to the headmaster's office because he had arrived at school with "no eyebrows, Harmony-red hair, and one gigantic earring". "I dropped out of school, because it got to be too dangerous for somebody who looked a little different. At that time, I was experimenting with hair dyes and stuff like that, and I was going to a particularly macho-oriented school and causing too much controversy." Summarizing his time at school, Burns stated: "I learnt nothing at school. I hated it. I was just really into David Bowie so I shaved off my eyebrows and dyed my hair orange, I was alienated in the seventies at school." During this time, Burns was also raped by a man who drove him to Raby Mere and threatened him with an air gun. "I thought I should have been upset about that," wrote Burns. "But I wasn't."

Career

Early career and band formation

Between 1977 and 1984, Burns worked as a shop assistant at Probe Records, a small independent record shop in Liverpool. Burns had been hired by Probe owner Geoff Davies due to his outlandish appearance (which included an "eighteenth-century shepherd's smock, an upside-down straw top hat with his dreads cascading out of the top, full make-up and massive heeled boots") that he hoped would attract customers. Burns later said that "Geoff only employed me for the glamour" and "people would travel from Wales and Leeds, just to look at me. They used to call me King – I was like King Punk." After being hired, Burns would lash out at customers if he disliked their music choices, behaviour which was encouraged by Davies. "I'm not lettin' yer waste yer money on that shite," Burns exclaimed to one customer who wanted to buy an LP record. BBC radio producer Graham Robertson recalled Burns's time at Probe:

Some kids were scared to go up to the counter when Pete was serving as he was acerbic and scathing but, overall, he was really funny. I personally relished going up to pay as it was always entertaining. My mates would often give me their records to pay for and I would place our selections on the counter and attempt to catch his eye – he was usually permanently immersed in an animated conversation and would often serve you without breaking from it!

Despite his later success, Burns did not have ambitions to be a singer and said that he hated the sound of his voice, wishing he had been able to sing falsetto like Sylvester. He also 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" and refused to promote his work; "I used to let it sink or swim on its own."

In 1977, Burns formed a punk 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 Club in Liverpool in November 1977) before disintegrating. Cope stated that Burns's performing style drew on that of the transgender punk performer Jayne County and Wylie recalled that "his head looked like someone had melted a load of black vinyl down into a kind of space quiff." Burns continued in early 1979 with a new band, Nightmares in Wax (originally called Rainbows Over Nagasaki), featuring a gothic post-punk sound, with backing from keyboardist Martin Healy, guitarist Mick Reid, bassist Rob Jones (who left to be replaced by Walter Ogden), and drummer Paul Hornby (who also exited after the band's formation to be replaced by Phil Hurst).

The group played their first gig supporting Wire at Eric's Club 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 titled 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 turned halfway into KC and 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 co-produced by Zeus B. Held ("What I Want" and "I'd Do Anything") were released but 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 cover of the 1975 hit by KC and the Sunshine Band. That song, along with "Misty Circles", were also hits on the US Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart. The album was a minor success in the UK, where it peaked at No. 29. As Burns and his band achieved greater media exposure, his eccentric and androgynous appearance often led to comparisons with Culture Club and its lead singer Boy George as well as "Calling Your Name" singer Marilyn. Burns described producing his first album as "the most joyous experience of my life, full of happy memories, because there was no commercial pressure on us."