Pete Burns will be remembered by the majority of people for his cosmetic surgery and his worldwide smash hit ‘You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)’. But for those of us who were misfits in the early `80s Pete Burns was so much more.  As soon as he started to receive coverage in the national media in 1980 with the release of his band Dead or Alive’s first single, ‘Falling’, we were hooked. Pete wasn’t your run-of-the-mill pop star. He didn’t care if anyone liked him, he certainly didn’t want your mother or grandmother to like him, he just wanted to sing, to shock and become famous whilst doing it. It wasn’t until Dead or Alive released their eighth single, ‘That’s The Way (I Like It)’, that they cracked the Top Thirty, with Pete’s overtly sexual bumping and grinding in canary yellow hot pants on ‘Top of the Pops’ inciting a flurry of disgusted viewers to jam the BBC switchboard. That should’ve been the end of Pete’s commercial success, and he would’ve been destined to forever remain a cult hero for a few of us die-hards who’d been fans since ‘Falling’ were it not for ‘You Spin Me Round’…. although things were never that straightforward with Pete. ‘You Spin Me’ went up and down the lower reaches of the charts for four months until, seventeen weeks after it was released, it finally reached Number One. More hits followed but there were more misses – although that wasn’t indicative of the quality of the music. To paraphrase Norma Desmond in ‘Sunset Boulevard’: ‘It’s just that the charts got smaller.’ And as Pete wrote in the sleeve-notes to his compilation album, ‘Evolution’: ‘In my mind they were all Number One hits.’ They were in my mind too….

I remember a night in `96 when Pete dragged me out of a nightclub to accompany him back to his house in Notting Hill to collect a backing tape he needed to do an impromptu P.A. We hung out for a bit, he got changed about fifty times, he asked me to help him retouch his make-up, he got impatient with me for taking too long then proceeded to smear black shoe polish on his cheeks, and an hour or so later at about half past midnight his chauffeur deposited us back on Charing Cross Road. As Pete stepped out of the car, a six-inch stiletto heel of his white Versace gladiator boots snapped off. Limping, he dragged me into a twenty-four hour shop. He ignored the queue and basically browbeat the shopkeeper into giving him a tube of Super Glue – for free, of course. He brought the entire shop to a standstill, although he was way too absorbed in repairing his heel to notice people’s faces. After stomping around the aisles for five minutes in order to be sure his heel was stuck on and wouldn’t come off mid-performance, he dragged me out of that shop still totally unaware of the dozens of people gawping at him, or if he was aware, simply not giving a ****.  And with all the criticism and ridicule his cosmetic surgery garnered, Pete continued to not give a ****. As he wrote in a song from 2000: ‘The London image makers, faces made for mirror-breaking, should know their magazines cannot affect my self-esteem.’ He was his own creation, he loved the way he looked, in his own words he was ‘freak unique’, and in an Instagram world of banal Barbies we desperately need more Petes…