Pete Burns the Brit pop-singer who became a Reality TV personality, died suddenly yesterday after a massive cardiac arrest. He was 57 years old. Boy George mourning his passing, described Burns as ‘one of our great true eccentrics‘.
Burns found fame as a member of a proto-goth group originally called Nightmares in Wax before they changed it to Dead or Alive in 1984 and started gaining some success with their cover version of “That’s the Way (I Like It)”. The band had a number one hit in the UK in 1985 with “You Spin Me Round” which also reached the Top 20 in the US.
When his music career faded the flamboyant singer found a new career in reality television often getting himself in deep water for swearing about Michael Jackson, or causing uproar for claiming that his fur coat was actually made from gorilla, but it was his ever-changing appearance that created the most column inches in celebrity rags. Burns had always sported a very androgynous look but admitted one time to having an addiction to cosmetic surgery, having over 300 operations in his lifetime, mainly on his face, and in 2006 almost died on the table during nose surgery.
In his autobiography ‘Freak Unique’ he wrote “changing my face is like buying a new sofa” and that there was “not a part of me, apart from the soles of my feet, which has not had work done. For me, plastic surgery is a matter of sanity, not vanity.” It was however his downfall too, as his decades-long obsession with surgically changing his appearance eventually led to bankruptcy after he had to pay out thousands for 18 months of corrective surgery in Italy when an operation on his lips went wrong.
Burns refused to conform or even confirm his sexuality claiming that there was no one word to describe his preference. He married Lynne Corlett in Liverpool in 1980, and when they separated in 2006, he married Michael Simpson shortly afterwards. In fact the two men appeared together in an episode of TV’s Celebrity Wife Swap. Simpson went to live with former page 3 model Leah Newman, while Burns lived with Newman’s partner, the footballer Neil Ruddock.
There are many photographs taken of Burns in recent years in between surgeries, most of which are dreadfully unflattering , the one below is one of the better ones.
Peter Jozzeppi “Pete” Burns 5 August 1959 – 23 October 2016 R.I.P.
