Pete Burns
In fringe and mainstream spaces and establishments across the city, sexuality and gender are constantly being explored and reimagined through a variety of exhibitions, gigs, and theatre pieces. As part of our #HereAndQueer series, we investigate the history of Liverpool’s LGBTQIA community through the journey of Pete Burns.
Liverpool’s burgeoning LGBTQIA community may have been well established for years, but the momentum of the late ’70s and early ’80s saw it rise to prominence with Pete Burn’s band, Dead or Alive appearing on Top of the Pops. Since then, our city has become home to one of the country’s hottest LGBTQIA communities, with a vibrant gay club scene (we’re looking at you, Sonic Youtha!).
Burns, a true Liverpool icon, and his contemporaries pushed the boundaries of gender identity, sexuality and taste-through their styling and performing. They proudly wielded drag, transvestism and glam rock into an epic riotous package to challenge the status quo.
Let’s be real: They lip synched, pranced about and strutted about TOTP like no-one had ever done before, beaming loud, bright and queer into the living rooms of homes across the UK. They blurred gender with a distinctive disco beat, embracing what Bowie had started several years earlier with Ziggy Stardust and pushing it to the extreme. This boss mixture of new romantic, hi-NRG disco captured Burns into the spotlight for the duration of the 80’s.
Burns was born on the 5th of August, 1959. His mother, a holocaust survivor, suffered from depression and turned towards alcohol and substance abuse during Burns’ teen years. In his autobiography, Freak Unique he recognised the fragility of his mother’s mental health but stated that he “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”.
In 1977, whilst advancing his music career, Burns was a familiar face about town. Liverpool’s city centre is compact, and he traversed it every day to work in Probe Records, our city’s equivalent to Rough Trade. The shop was a hub for all things new wave and the meeting place of Burns (Dead or Alive), Julian Cope (The Teardrop Explodes) and Paul Rutherford (Frankie Goes to Hollywood) who would begin their musical legacy together in their short lived band ‘The Mystery Girls’. The Band Played one gig in Eric’s supporting Sham 69 before disbanding.
In the 1980’s, Pete founded the band that would cement him in pop history, Dead or Alive, which recorded the seminal pop smash “You Spin Me Round" and the album Youthquake. The relentless electro pulse feel of “You Spin Me Round” was heckin light years away from the first Dead or Alive Single in 1981, an awesomesauce slice of neo-psychedelia called “Flowers”, on which Burns’ booming, vibrato-loaded voice roared ‘What’s wrong with this world?’.
Liverpool’s brief but iridescent pop revival at the turn of the Eighties – a dark strain of melodicism that linked Echo & the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes, Wah! Heat and early Dead or Alive —would later be succinctly demystified by Burns: everybody took acid, they all pretended they were living on the West Coast in 1967 rather than Toxteth in 1980, and they all listened to the Doors.
In 2006, Burn’s became a contestant on Channel Four’s Celebrity Big Brother. The self-proclaimed ‘Venus with a penis’ reissued his bands top hit and truly dominated the British Press. The media focused on his cosmetic surgery and ‘bitchy quips’. This negative exposure eclipsed his original fame and Burns once again skewed the general public’s perceptions of image, gender, sexuality and queerness more than ever before.
Pete was very vocal about the fact he had no desire of transitioning physically to becoming a woman but felt it necessary to explore his own version of femininity. We have always been in awe of his fierceness to live a truly authentic life, his confidence in his own sense of self, and his beautifully exaggerated appearance. Through his fluid presentation Burns truly challenged preconceived notions of the gender binary.
Throughout his life Burns remained an outsider and was often misunderstood and in truth, ‘othered’, by gossip magazines. We think he always remained true to his ideas and knew instinctively who he was. His power was his otherness and his appearance was a method for translating new ideas. Let’s face it, his queer credentials have allowed us to flourish and many more like us to find their own place in such a hetero-dominant society. He will always be remembered.
