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.
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. 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". However, he maintained that she was "absolutely the best mother in the world" despite the child abuse he experienced:
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." "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." 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." 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). 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)". 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. 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.
During his time in Liverpool, Burns became acquainted with Courtney Love shortly after she moved to the area in 1982 using money from a small trust fund. When Burns became "the local celebrity punk", he remembered how Love "would call me all sorts of names on the street and it got to the stage where I just sort of loved her for that. She had, like, a complete lack of respect for the divinity I had in the city at the time." He also noted, "I'd never met Burns, but knew of his reputation for being evil."
Chart success
thumb|upright|[[Probe Records (shop)|Probe Records located at Bluecoat Chambers, 2010]]
The band released its second album Youthquake (US No. 31, UK No. 9) in May 1985, produced by the then-fledgling production team of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman, known as Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW). Desiring to move on from the sound of the band's debut studio album, Sophisticated Boom Boom, Burns wanted "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" to be produced by the little-known team, in the Hi-NRG style of their 1984 UK hits "You Think You're a Man" by Divine, and "Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)" by Hazell Dean. Recording of the single was plagued by arguments between the band and producers, The song proved to be SAW's first chart-topping single. The track also hit No. 11 in the US and No. 1 in Canada.
In a 2009 interview discussing the song, Burns disputed the Hi-NRG label, saying "to me it was just disco", and describing the song as "a pop hit, not a hi-NRG hit". Burns would later criticise SAW for their methods, describing that "they took our sound and just basically wheeled it off with a load of other imbeciles, and that makes me a bit sour." Additionally, Burns said that 12-inch singles comprised over 70% of the original sales of "You Spin Me Round", and because these were regarded by the record label as promotional tools rather than sales, the band had to threaten legal action against the label before they received the royalties on them.
Other album tracks released as singles included "Lover Come Back To Me" (No. 11), "In Too Deep" (No. 14), and "My Heart Goes Bang (Get Me to the Doctor)" (No. 23) which all reached the UK Top 30. Despite the international chart-topping success of Youthquake and its lead single, Burns said it was the album that he was "most dissatisfied with" and recalled that "one of the unhappiest days of my life was when Spin Me reached No. 1 – and I mean really unhappy. Because I knew it would be downhill all the way after that." SAW's recording engineer Karen Hewitt recalled the singer appeared to thrive on his often explosive and confrontational dynamic with Stock and Aitken during the album sessions.
The lead single "Brand New Lover" became a modest UK hit, peaking at No. 31, but was more successful in the US, where it reached No. 15 on the US Hot 100, and No. 1 on the US Billboard dance chart.
Clashes between the band and the label continued over the song's music video, with Epic Records reportedly objecting to a "mildly suggestive" sequence involving Burns and a banana. "By the time we got to 'Something in My House', I felt I wanted to express myself on film, as well as record, amuse myself, show my sense of humour," Burns wrote on the liner notes to his Evolution: The Videos compilation DVD. "Well apparently the manner in which I 'peeled a banana' seemed to work against me/us! And, it was downhill all the way after that."
Recording of the song was also fraught, with Burns alleging that producer Mike Stock erased his original vocal take after objecting to the singer's use of the phrase "wicked queen"; a lyrical double entendre implying reference to a gay relationship. "We would butt heads so fucking badly; it was unbelievable," Burns told journalist James Arena in his book Europe's Stars of 80s Dance Pop. "That's why we eventually walked away from them. For instance, there was a lyric from 'Something in My House' where I make reference to a wicked queen. "The actual producer, Mike Stock stopped me and said I couldn't use that term because it would mean the record is about gay people. I was like, 'Fuck this, it's going on!' They actually wiped the original vocal, but then Pete Waterman came back and said, 'Let him do it the way he wants to.'" The song also proved to be the act's final Top 40 hit with an original release in the UK, and their last Top 20 hit in Australia. was released to club DJs, featuring a series of stronger dialogue clips from The Exorcist – with the track described as "unique" in its capacity as the only known example of a "filthy, obscene [and] sexually explicit" Stock Aitken Waterman record. A third single, "Hooked on Love", failed to make the UK Top 40 amid Burns' battle with the label over their refusal to prioritise his preferred mix, which featured a "Gothic" overtone.
In 1986, Burns recommended model Mandy Smith to Waterman. Smith was already well-known in the British tabloids due to her relationship with Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, which started when she was 13. Smith became the very first artist signed to Waterman's PWL Records in September 1986 when she was 16 years old. In 1987, Dead or Alive released their greatest hits album Rip It Up, and a concert tour of the same name with dates in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Film footage was recorded at two shows at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan on 9 October and at Osaka's Osaka-jō Hall on 11 October, and released on video cassette (VHS) and Laserdisc that same year under the title Rip It Up Live. The concert was eventually issued as bonus material for the first time on DVD as part of the 2003 compilation release. Due to their immense popularity in the region, Michael Jackson was forced to reschedule his Japanese tour dates during his Bad World Tour so as not to conflict with Dead or Alive. One contemporary Japanese newspaper even ran the headline, "Forget Madonna, we've got Pete Burns!"