Feature: Freak or unique?
When the 1980s pop star Pete Burns recently appeared on TV, jaws dropped. So who — or what — does he think he is, asks SIMON MILLS

Pete Burns’s performance as a panellist on Never Mind the Buzzcocks a few weeks back was car-crash television at its most compelling. It will go down alongside Tara Palmer-Tomkinson’s appearance on The Frank Skinner Show and Oliver Reed’s drunken ranting on Parkinson. And it wasn’t just what Burns said or did, but how he looked. He had Cat Deeley’s hair, tonged, streaked and flicked like a Charlie’s Angels barnet, Jordan’s swollen, collagened lips, cheekbones that could shave parmesan and what looked like the beginnings of a fine pair of pneumatic breasts.

Any man or woman within the appropriate thirtysomething-pop-fan demographic watching the show was probably doing the same disbelieving double take as me. Who (or what), they were asking themselves, is this toughened- up Lily Savage exchanging bitchy spitfire with Mark Lamarr? Oh my God, it’s that bloke from Dead or Alive, the one who had a big hit with You Spin Me Round back in the 1980s. What the hell has he done to himself?

Meeting Pete Burns in the flesh is far less intimidating than you expect. He pads around his rather smart west London house dressed like an off-duty All Saint: a spaghetti-strapped top, a shimmering, diamanté Vivienne Westwood belt buckle and combat pants slung low on his hips. The swollen lips, trowelled-on maquillage, tribal tattoos and pumped-up torso (a result of daily sessions on the weights, punishing six-mile runs seven days a week, and marathon kick-boxing workouts) are freakish but not particularly scary. The self-confessed "moody bugger" even smiles at me a few times. But Burns is not a charmer. He berates me for my "tacky" line of questioning and all-too-brief discussion of his musical career since he fell off the pop map in the late 1980s. (For the record, the band continue to thrive in Germany, parts of America and, most successfully, Japan, and release a new, remixed greatest-hits package, Fragile, later this year.) But to avoid a detailed discussion of his image would seem, er, perverse. "I’m interested in the art of transformation. Always have been," he says when pushed. "Not out of a sense of dissatisfaction. I’ve just always seen it as a form of magic. Make-up, tattoos, cosmetic surgery- any way of taking this raw material and changing it into what you want. During adolescence, I can remember thinking: ‘I’m getting bored of this now.’ Back then, I didn’t have the knowledge, so I decided to do some very careful investigation." And then the work began in earnest ...

There are many grisly Harley Street rumours about Burns’s self-inflicted face-aches. One has him slavishly copying his look from Myra Breckinridge, Gore Vidal’s sex-changer, as portrayed by Raquel Welch in the 1970 movie of the same name. Another has one of Burns’s plastic cheekbones shifting out of place while he was shaving. Alas, he won’t confirm or deny any of these Frankensteinian anecdotes (although he states proudly that he’s "not stopped yet"), and refuses to conduct an inventory of the work he’s had done. “"I’m not going to give details like that," he snaps. "And it’s less than you’d think, by the way. But what I will say is this: anything I want done, I will do. To me, the body is like a new flat. After a few years, you redecorate, knock a wall or two down. You get bored with looking in the mirror and seeing the same old thing. I’m not going to sit here and say it’s all down to exercise and brussels sprouts. I don’t have any qualms about altering something. I’m not doing it to thrill anyone except myself."

A seamlessly fluent raconteur, whose voice is barbed, rasping, but surprisingly butch and uncamp, Burns accepts that his look is unfriendly, confrontational and, as he says, "not designed to appeal to children". He is not a cuddly freak, as Boy George once aimed to be, but an aggressive one who happily admits to being "intolerant of other human beings". He has a small, tightknit group of friends, doesn’t go out much, won’t play ball with the glossy end of the press and generally "likes (his) own company". People who bother him in the streets, he says, "don’t go away very happy".

But, if he’s a solitary person who doesn’t crave attention, why has he chosen a career in pop music? Pop is "easy", he says, flatly and unemotionally. And why the hell did he appear, like a lip-glossed lamb to the slaughter, on a show like Buzzcocks? "I have no idea why I did it, but let me tell you, there are better ways to spend seven hours of a Monday afternoon than watching comedians reading jokes off idiot boards." There is an upside to his television notoriety, though. Burns’s next-door neighbours, who haven’t spoken to him once during the 15 years he has lived at his current address, have started saying "Hello" to him since the infamous broadcast. And Burns himself has come up with a rather brilliant name for the show. For me, Mark Lamarr’s pop quiz will now always be known as Never Mind the Botox.