Pat Geary speaks to Pete Burns on September 17th, 2000. Recorded in the UK. A RIGHT STUFF exclusive!!

Pete: We've got a lot of troubles on our horizon...but I have a feeling, and it's not overconfidence, it's just a feeling, and it's almost an inner voice that comes around me: "Everything is going to be ok; everything is going to be ok. Learn patience."

Pat: I certainly hope you're right. I have a feeling as well, talking to you now, you sound really focused and you sound like you're feeling so much better than you've been. Everything looks like it's on the upswing now for Dead or Alive. I know people have been waiting for a long time now...

Pete: Pat, so many times with Dead or Alive it's been "yes, yes Yes, YEs, YES" [voice rising], and then "NO, NO, No, no, no" [voice falling].

Pat: Yeah.

Pete: And that could happen again, but I'm kind of used to it. Put it this way, I ain't marking out properties I'm going to buy in the street next week. I'm doing things one step at a time. And this has even alarmed Lynne and Steve. They're worried sick because Steve said, "It's not you."
I was shopping with Jason today, my keyboard player, and he said, "Hey, I'm really worried. It's just not you. How could you deal with this, like go up to Cher so calmly?" I said, "Because I have actually achieved something, too."

Pat: Yeah, you change both physically and mentally, I think.

Pete: Yeah, but I do feel mother's presence around me, because she left this mortal coil with a lot of unfulfilled ambitions. And more than anything, I wasn't a mummy's boy, because I was more parental for her. But her smartness and her street savvy and her survival through the Holocaust and her priorities... For instance, she sheltered in cellars after her apartments had been bombed. And when my father, Frank, met her, her true family, he thought, saw them off at the station to the UK. They weren't her family at all. One was a hairdresser and wigmaker and the other was her masseur. In the meanwhile, she survived on a diet of candles, because they were good for her figure and she could still wear her mink coat.

Pat: Good heavens.

Pete: But when she came to Liverpool she spoke no English. Everybody mistook her for a Nazi, and the only way she could find her way from A to B was by chalking on the walls.
So I've got all her street savvy. And she put all her energy into me, really. When she was sick with lung cancer, I didn't lose it, because I knew I couldn't lose it. It was the day I was doing a photo session, and my dad said "Mum's got lung cancer". She was sitting in the flat at the time. I thought, "Ok, ok, what to do now. Alternative medicine."
She was given six weeks to live. She lived eleven months. And she lived those eleven months healthier than she'd lived the last ten years of her life.
I bought them an apartment in the next street to me, saw her on a daily basis. I left for Japan to do the tour that broke us there, the Budokan thing. In the middle of it, she died in hospital. The day she went into hospital she died, and I think, I really believe, she did that deliberately. She chose that time to go. I believe she did that so that the grief of losing her wouldn't be too much for me to bear. And I had to carry on.
Immediately after she died, after she'd been cremated, I'd begun the process of recording "Nude". And there's a lot of themes in "Nude" like "Baby Don't Say Goodbye" that may sound like love songs to lovers and stuff like that, but it's also that emotion of, you know, the time is coming we'll soon be parted.
I look for emotional experiences and sometimes they can be very disturbing emotional experiences. I'll look for the emotion in things. Like I was really upset that Paula Yates died. Not to the point that I felt grief, but more like "what a waste". It upset me and it gave me something to think about, rather than meeting Cher and the new foundation that I'd bought.

Pat: Yeah, I know, it leaves you feeling kind of hollow or something, when something like that happens.

Pete: Well, not hollow. It's just that how fragile life is and how fragile people really are. They're really incredibly fragile.

Pat: The songs that you played for me, Pete, this week, are those recently written or have those been written for awhile now?

Pete: Oh, God no, there are a lot more written before that. They were written on the hop, because I kept changing direction. I couldn't find any musical inspiration in my record collection whatsoever, and I had to pull it from the core of my gut. The absolute core of my gut. And of course, Pat, during those two years when I was really sick, I wasn't up for much experience, other than I was lucky to get into the bath and out on my own without calling for help. So I had to call on certain past experiences. And I also had to call on experiences I know will happen to me in the future.

Pat: I notice that there is still a bit of the Easternisms that we heard on "Nukleopatra".

Pete: Well, I feel a very strong affinity with the East. I mean my Egyptian tattoos, I'm not saying I thought I was Cleopatra in a former life. But I've studied the Egyptians, and I feel a very strong affinity. If you look into it, they had a third gender. And they were entombed with the Pharoahs. They had a third gender, men who had breasts. Luckily, I don't have them, because I don't want 'em.
But these men were considered great artists and nurturing spirits. And I feel a real affinity...look, let's be really crass about it: the Egyptians invented the wig and the miniskirt.

Pat: (laughs)

Pete: The 1960's was Egypt.

Pat: So we owe 'em for that, at least.

Pete: We owe the Egyptians a hell of a lot. I believe that they probably did have space travel.

Pat: Well, I just felt ripped off that no big record company gave you guys loads of dosh to film a spectacular Nukleopatra video to go with that song because it would have been a scream, I think. It was such a visual song.

Pete: It was quite an honest, cartoony song. Because it was my life in a cartoon. I did visit a psychic. And they said, "You had past lives." And they didn't come up with Nukleopatra, but ancient Egypt and many other places came up in that. Like there are places that I still long to visit. But I don't know how I'm going to organise this.
There are places I feel an affinity with. One of the most emotional, and I don't mean emotional in a teary way, but it made me think...when I moved to Holland Park in, I think it was '86, and I was working with Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman (when he was in the building) on "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know", and Mike Stock started telling me about his psychic experiences, pyromania, mattresses used to burst into flames when he was a kid. You could hold an object and know everything about somebody. And he had to have psychiatric help because he was only an adolescent.
And we got talking about this. Because he was actually quite fascinated by how I could go in front of a microphone and just do the lyric start to finish with no paper and no pre-planning. Which is very easy for me to do. But sometimes I'll try and plan ahead, because of budgets.
And he thought, you know, "this is coming from somewhere else" because of the migraines that accompanied them. And I'm not saying that to be dramatic. It's a bad migraine, but I don't need medication for it. I just feel kinda drained, like last night I was, not unsteady on my legs, I just wanted to be alone and just sit with the TV off and a Sade record on or something like that, you know.

Pat: Just collect yourself.

Pete: Yeah. And at the time we were with CBS, which is now Sony, and we'd had a number one single, and they were still booking us into low class hotels. And for some reason, I had walked through the West end of London and seen the Westbury Hotel. And I had to go to the Westbury Hotel. And there was nowhere else I was going to stay but the Westbury Hotel. And I'd never been inside the building. And during the recording of "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know", they weren't getting a recording unless I was staying at the Westbury. I didn't know why I wanted to be in the Westbury.

Pat: (laughs)

Pete: But around the corner it's Berkeley Square. Since the tiniest age of a child, I have felt a chill down my back, and I don't know the song, but if ever I hear the song, I think Vera Lynn did it, "A Nightengale sang in Berkeley Square", I know I lived at number 31 Berkeley Square on the top floor.
And after a lot of intense talk with Mike Stock, who's not that pleasant a person, he told me Lord Byron had lived there. And I knew nothing of Lord Byron. I thought he made pens (laughs), I was really uneducated on that level. And then he said to me, "you've got to get a book called 'Past Lives'." And I really wasn't that interested at the time.
But strangely enough, right next door to my flat in Holland Park was an antique book dealer. And Steve and I were getting out of a cab one night, and there was the book in the window. It was called "More Lives Than One".

TO BE CONTINUED

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