Pete Burns wasn’t nice, kind, or fair. But he was unforgettable

“If I could be Pete Burns for one day then had to die, I would.” 

I was either in the canteen in Childwall College or lounging on a tatty green vinyl armchair in my living room when I spat out this now-immortal line (immortal to my odd little circle of friends, anyway). It was one of my regular teenage bouts of attention-seeking; had God, Satan or some other supernatural force actually offered me a deal along the lines of “okay, let’s go for it: you get to be him for 24 hours then that’s it, the party’s over”, there’s no way I’d have actually gone for it. 

Dicing with death — even flippantly — wasn’t really my thing. I was a selfish kid obsessed with living my own best life: young, happy and healthy, brimming with bombastic bluster and intent on pushing polite boundaries with as many cavalier ideas as I could put out there — and this was one of them. But I know what I meant: if only I could have just a tiny fraction of the unique charisma that Pete Burns had, I’d be fabulous… and probably as terrified of myself as I was of him, back in the day.

My fascination with Burns wasn’t a cliched teenage crush. I didn’t fancy him; he was too alien-weird to be hot, too cool to be thought of as sexy, too vile to be approachable. He wasn’t, to me, pin-up material — and yet…

Decades later, I’m sitting in Bold Street’s legendary Cafe Tabac surrounded by tastefully framed pin-ups of Burns in all his glory: cheekbones sharp enough to file your nails on, eyes blacker than coal, attitude as audacious as it gets. 

The exhibition, Total Stranger: The Unseen Photographs of Pete Burns and Dead or Alive 1978–1983, opened here this summer and will be on display at Cafe Tabac until the end of the year — a selection of 16 images by Francesco Mellina that take us on a journey through Burns’ transformation from underground icon to international star..  

Once again, I can’t take my eyes off him. The images dominate the cafe’s walls just as Burns himself once dominated Liverpool’s post-punk cultural scene. I’m one-part thrilled, one-part spellbound, all parts intimidated, just like I was almost 50 years ago when I first saw him promenading along Richmond Street wearing what appeared to be a massive muslin nappy and a huge American-Indian headdress, fake tan streaked all over his muscular calves — and a raspberry ripple ice cream in his hand. 

I’m surrounded by memories not just of Burns but of Cafe Tabac, back in the days when he and his clique used to take over a table as regularly as my friends and I did. I can almost hear the snarking, bitching and gossip that ricocheted off the walls around them, the scent of their patchouli oil mingling with the smell of cigarettes, coffee and bacon. 

Mellina was one of them, the cooler-than-cool Italian with a thick floppy fringe, camera always in his hand. He lived in the slipstream of the late 70s/early 80s ‘in-crowd’, not only in Liverpool but around the world. From Echo and the Bunnymen to Joey Ramone, Joe Strummer and Roxy Music, Francesco snapped them all. But of all of them, Burns and his bands Nightmares in Wax and Dead or Alive — who Mellina managed at Burns’ request for several years, building the momentum that led to their 1984 disco-frenzy global hit You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) — dominated his dark room.

“I’ve been wanting to do this exhibition for at least 20 years,” Francesco tells me. “But here we are; sometimes when stars align, they just align.”

Burns — who died of a heart attack in October 2016, aged just 57 — was probably the darkest star in the galaxy of flamboyant attention-seekers that illuminated Britain’s hedonistic subculture back when the headlines were dominated by riots, spiralling unemployment figures and the AIDS pandemic. Those headlines, in my shallow world at least, paled into insignificance when it came to considering the pressing issues of the day: mirror, mirror on the (scruffy bedsit) wall… who is the fairest urban catwalk peacock of them all? It was Burns back then, and it’s still Burns today.

Francesco’s photos focus on the years before Burns turned himself, over decades of cosmetic surgery, into a fantastical hybrid of Shelley Duvall’s Olive Oyl in Altman’s Popeye with more than a hint of Greta Garbo. They capture Burns as close to au naturel as he ever got.

In one photo, he’s sporting red rags in tatty dreads; in the next, a cowboy hat at a coquettish angle. One outfit in particular screams Vivienne Westwood, but most of them can only have been all his own work. He’s the Queen of Sheba styled by Leigh Bowery in a schlock-horror film where Dracula meets a pantomime dame, exuding the near-miss beauty of Bolan and the fuck-you attitude of Byron. He could annihilate anybody who crossed him with a barrage of withering put-downs.

“People judged Pete according to their experience of him,” says Francesco. “I saw both sides of him — good and bad. I was lucky to get to know him as a person rather than what other people saw, but a lot of people were scared of him. It’s easy to see why: he looked the way he looked — and he had such a sharp tongue.”

“He was a knobhead,” says a very good friend during a wine-fuelled debate about how I could possibly still be interested in the guy who, when I briefly ‘worked for him’ at Probe Records in 1979 at 14 years old, didn’t even pay me for my time. I freely admit I that I worked there for nothing more than what I saw as the kudos of being in his presence (by the way, Burns didn’t actually own Probe; the late, great Geoff Davies and his wife Annie did, and I’m confident that they knew nothing about my non-employment non-contract).

My “volunteer” role at Probe — where Burns spent most of his time berating customer purchases with put-downs that were at once soul-destroying and hilarious — included being sent out at lunchtime to buy sausage rolls that he’d sling in the bin if they weren’t the required temperature. He once told me, very loudly, to breathe in when the shop was busy so that everybody else had a chance to move (I was a chubby kid, to put it politely). Fortunately, I had Little Vinnie, with his little clothes rail at the back of the shop, to run to for solace and sympathy. 

Burns wasn’t nice or kind or even fair to me, ever — and to this day, my loyal friend loathes him for that. But I remain indignant in my defense of my childhood anti-hero. Who was the knobhead, Burns for treating me the way he did, or me for allowing him to get away with it? And anyway, I was hardly Patty Hearst; I was just fascinated by a cultural urban guerilla who, when he entered the Celebrity Big Brother house in 2006, claimed that his fur coat was made of actual gorilla fur, sparking an investigation by Hertfordshire Constabulary. 

Some people only know Burns as a result of that now-legendary CBB brouhaha; even if you didn’t watch the charade, you’ll be aware that Burns' non-stop, 24-hour livestream of tantrums, hissy fits and verbal ballistics still top the contemporary TV folklore charts today.

In his later years, he continued to dabble in reality shows (Channel 4’s Celebrity Wife Swap; the Biography channel’s Psychic Therapy; E4’s Body Shocking Show; Channel 5’s Celebrity Wedding Planner) - an odd choice for a man who said, in a 1998 interview with American cable channel VH1, “you shouldn't inflict yourself on the public when your fifteen minutes is up.” But Peter Jozzepi Burns’ fifteen minutes were never up.

I’m not attempting to write a Pete Burns obituary here, plenty of those were written when he died, some considerate and attentive, others hastily assembled for click-bait, many written by people who had clearly never met him in person. 

His 2006 autobiography Freak Unique takes you deep into the psyche behind those infamous, super-sinister black-hole contact lenses; his complicated relationship with his complicated mother; his long-term marriage to Lynne (a stunning style icon in her own right); his love life; the botched lip augmentation that left him “suicidal” and forced him to sell his £2m house so he could pay for corrective surgery. 

Unsurprisingly, there’s plenty of drama in there. But if you also want to know what he really thought - of people, places and things; of his world, our world, and the strange, almost other-worldly planet he inhabited — that’s all in there too, proving that he was as clever and articulate on paper as he was in person — perhaps even more so.

Were there more books in Burns? We’ll never know. There could, however, have been a sparkling return to his musical roots. He was due to appear on ITV lunchtime talk show Loose Women to promote the Sophisticated Boom Box MMXVI box set due to be released on 24 October, the day after he died. His final tweet, posted on 13 October, simply (and with hindsight, rather ominously) read “Counting down the days…”.

“Pete was made of very many facets,” says Francesco. “We all are — it’s just that in some people, those facets are more extreme. But Pete was not just talented — he was also extremely clever, which people don’t give him credit for. If you’re perceptive enough, it’s obvious.”

Francesco’s Total Stranger exhibition will either confirm or alter your perception of Pete Burns. For those of us who came of age in the 1980s it might move you to nostalgic tears. Younger culture vultures, meanwhile, might be introduced to a visionary, personality-laden character that their parents were barely aware of. Somewhere in between, there will be those who look up from their phones while taking a coffee pitstop and think, “Oh yeah, Pete Burns — I remember him”.

I’ll never forget him.

Total Stranger: The Unseen Photographs of Pete Burns and Dead or Alive 1978–1983 can be seen at Cafe Tabac (Bold Street) from now until the end of December https://cafetabac.co.uk/