How Pete Burns helped to create our fatuous modern world

So RIP Pete Burns, transgendered Scouse popstar. His indescribably awful song ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’ — clever allusion, no? — reached number one in 1985 and, as part of the band Dead Or Alive, he had a couple of minor follow-up hits.

When David Bowie died in January of this year, a lot was made of his supposed pioneering androgyny. I said here at the time that Bowie was deservedly famous for having written many melodically clever songs, rather than being at the forefront of the LGBT liberation movement, which he emphatically was not. Bowie may have been fashionably androgynous — so were Mick Jagger and even Marc Bolan before him. But one always knew that Bowie was a man and he did not pretend otherwise.

Burns, who possessed much chutzpah but not a single discernible shred of talent, might have a greater claim to the old ‘breaking down barriers’ stuff. He looked like, and kind of became, a parody of a woman, resembling in his later years the New York socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein, horribly disfigured by plastic surgery, the skin on his face stretched taut and with a giant cod nailed to his mouth to resemble luscious lips.

The mid-1980s were really the first time we had seen this kind of thing and the still popular Top of the Pops was full of it — Pete Burns, the equally untalented Marilyn, a partially dreadlocked Boy George caterwauling his facile, syrupy hits and the marginally talented but charmless Grace Jones looking cross and very mannish. They had all probably been emboldened by Bowie but this was unquestionably a large step further.

I remember a review of a Boy George concert in the Evening Standard at the time — ‘Loved him, hated her’, the critic joked, without being prosecuted for a hate crime.