Pete Burns has passed away at the age of 57.
The Dead or Alive singer died Sunday after suffering a “massive cardiac arrest.”
A statement from his management team said:
“It is with the greatest sadness that we have to break the tragic news that our beloved Pete Burns of (Dead or Alive), died suddenly yesterday of a massive cardiac arrest. All of his family and friends are devastated by the loss of our special star. He was a true visionary, a beautiful talented soul, and he will be missed by all who loved and appreciated everything he was and all of the wonderful memories he has left us with. We have no more words, we will make a further statement when we have had a chance to come to terms with our devastating loss. He will live forever in our memories. Sending you all our love. Lynne, Michael, Steve. [sic]”
The singer was last on TV when he appeared on “Celebrity Botched Up Bodies” last month.
Burns, who said he had “lost count” of the number of times he had gone under the knife, shared his story on the Channel 5 show. He said, “The number of surgeries I’ve has is probably 300. I hope when I’m 80 and I get to heaven, God doesn’t recognize me.”
But a number of fans of the star tweeted their hope that he would stop having plastic surgery after everything he had been through.
One wrote, “Pete please stop now. #celebritybotchedupbodies” while another added: “Love #peteburns but what has he done to himself #botchedupbodies.”
He said his obsession with changing his looks began over 20 years ago when his hit “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” was storming up the charts. Burns continued, “I realized I was going to be a visual entity and that I had to look good. I had a broken nose. In the punk days somebody head butted me in Liverpool and it went over to one side. When you’re young, self-conscious and standing in front of a camera and the photographers are whispering, ‘Can we turn his head to the left?’ you think, ‘I’ll do something about it.’”
Pete forked over £750 ($900) to get his nose fixed, but when he woke up from surgery, he knew something was terribly wrong.
He said, “I woke up covered in blood. There was so much blood it was unbelievable. There were tubes up my nose. He’d removed most of my nose and there was just two nostrils and a little bit of bone in the middle. I nearly fainted.”
Burns was due to appear on “Top Of The Pops” with his band and decided to put an eye patch on to hide the side of his nose that was bad. He later scheduled reconstructive surgery — the first of many, many corrective treatments. He admitted, “The amount of surgeries I’ve had are absolutely minimal compared to the reconstructive surgeries I’ve had. Probably 300.”
When Dead or Alive failed to produce another single, Burns found solace on the operating table. He underwent four nose jobs, two sets of cheekbone implants and lip augmentations, which turned out to be the “nightmare” of his life.
Desperate for a bigger pout, he scheduled lip fillers with the “lip king of London,” but during a gig with the Scissor Sisters, he felt a “burning sensation” in his lower lip.
Burns’ flaming lips were filling with fluid and he had to return to the surgeon to get them drained.
He said, “He held me down on the operating table and punched two syringes in. At least a pint and a half of yellow steaming fluid was vomited out of the lip.”
Burns’ lips continued to inflate and he was forced to drain them. Worst still, the permanent filler that was injected into his lips began migrating all over his face. He added, “I started to develop holes in my skin and if I so much as touched my face there would be an audible hissing and out onto the mirror would vomit this yellow fluid.”
The infection was spreading all over his body and Burns’ lips were at risk of amputation. He sued the surgeon and received £450,000 ($550,000) after settling out of court and used the money to have the filler removed.
Burns revealed, “I’ve had a major operation a week for two years to remove it from my cheeks where it had migrated, my Adam’s apple, the back of my eyes … They couldn’t do anything about the liver and the kidneys. I had to excrete that out.”
After 200 reconstructive surgeries on his lips to remove all the frightening filler, the surgeon could finally begin reviving Burns’ lifeless lips.
Burns explained, “I had a piece taken out of my stomach to make a lower lip and then a piece taken out of my stomach to make an upper lip shape. I was clinically depressed. Two years is a long time out of your life.”