Pete Burns’ devoted ex-wife Lynne Corlett stood by tragic star through affairs when fame and money fizzled out
Catty 'diva' relied on his beloved Lynne right to the end
SHE was with him as the riches of pop success gave way to bankruptcy – and when a disastrous rampage of plastic surgery left him looking barely human.
Pete Burns’ wife Lynne would always be the most important woman in his life, despite them divorcing and him marrying another man.
It was a sobbing Lynne who was at his side as he lay on a stretcher outside her unremarkable North London home on Sunday afternoon as paramedics tried — and failed — to save the 57-year-old singer after he suffered a cardiac arrest.
With his flamboyant appearance and penchant for cross-dressing, many would be surprised to learn the Dead Or Alive frontman was ever married to a woman.
However, he was completely devoted to her.
The pair, who worked in a shop in Liverpool before Pete’s sudden transformation to chart-topping pop star, tied the knot in August 1980.
Pete, who reached No1 in 1985 with You Spin Me Round (Like A Record), described his wedding as the happiest day of his life despite the registrar’s “feeble joke about which one is the bride”.
A romantic at heart, he took Lynne, now 57, on tour with him as he couldn’t understand how marriage could work thousands of miles apart.
He once said: “Surely marriage is throwing anchor and saying, ‘This is where I’m staying, I’ve made my choice and this is all I want because I’ve been on the up and down escalator, through the revolving door and I want to stand still.’”
Even when he married Michael Simpson in 2007, the trio lived together in Pete’s Notting Hill flat.
When he sold that to pay for reconstructive facial surgery, he reportedly gave Lynne £400,000.
She moved into her home in Willesden, North London, with Pete and Michael finding a place less than two miles away.
It was an unusual set-up, but that was Pete all over.
Friends say he needed Lynne because only she truly understood the paradoxes in his life.
Known for his music yet only having had one big hit, he strived for physical perfection but ended up damaging himself with surgery.
He refused to be defined. He was neither straight nor gay, not a transvestite but a “big burly bloke from Liverpool” who wore make-up.
Before his career took off, he worked at Probe Records in Liverpool, usually dressed in bondage trousers or leopard print. Despite craving approval, he would deliver each sale with a disdainful quip.
And when he and Lynne later sold clothes they had designed in the same shop, Pete would tell customers the garments were “crap”. If he later spotted someone wearing his designs, he would shriek: “The state of her!”
The sharp tongue never left him. His appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006 brought a new generation of fame, largely because of his bitchy battle with housemate Jodie Marsh.
In one stand-off, he said he would like to try “ripping her head off and s**tting on her headstone”.
However, this catty nature repelled almost everyone except Lynne, who he was married to for 25 years before their split in 2006.
A source who knew him well once said: “Pete was the diva’s diva. He wanted to make a comeback last year and rang round a few people but nobody wanted to touch him.
“He was just too much to handle. You had to be on-call 24 hours a day. He would call about something trivial in the middle of the night.
“He was very, very demanding. Not many people who worked with Pete in the past will work with him again. They knew it wasn’t worth it.”
As a child growing up in the model village of Port Sunlight, Cheshire, with his ex-soldier father, Francis, and Jewish- German mother, Eva, Pete set out to be different.
He recalled: “I was always very stubborn and had set ideas of who I was.
“I think my parents knew they were in trouble when I wouldn’t go to school without my headdress and my mother used to have to come to the yard and set up a wigwam so I could go in at break-time.”
Eva, who had fled the Nazis, became an alcoholic and dependent on prescription drugs while Pete was still a teenager. He remembered once arriving home to “find her with her wrists slashed and blood splattered all over the place” but added of her: “She’s the best human being that I’ve ever had the privilege of being in the company of.”
Music was something the troubled star fell into after being spotted by music manager Roger Eagle.
Dead Or Alive was his third band, and while You Spin Me Round was their only UK chart-topper, they gifted perennial pop hit-makers Stock, Aitken and Waterman their first British No1.
One friend who knew Pete in the Eighties said: “He would arrive at London’s top nightclubs with an entourage of pretty boys, while still professing to be straight. He wanted everyone to know who he was and would demand free drinks. Club owners didn’t like it because Pete had only had one hit but behaved worse than Wham! or Spandau Ballet.”
Certainly Lynne seemed to take it in her stride when he left her.
She said at the time: “We hadn’t drifted apart — we’re still as close as ever. We just needed a change. We had to grow in different directions.”
Pete’s fleeting music success came to be overshadowed by his vanity.
During his pop prime he would inject illegally imported Botox but this became an all-consuming drive to become a human “sculpture”.
A series of botched operations left his lower lip “hanging down like wax” and needing to be drained of “two paper cups of yellow steaming stinking fluid,” owing to an infection.
In 2009, he received a £450,000 payout after his plastic surgeon Dr Maurizio Viel admitted negligence.
Speaking after the settlement, Pete said: “I don’t think it was enough for what I have gone through. I have had liver failure, kidney failure, thrombosis in the arm and neck, holes in my face discharging pus and risked having my lips amputated.
“I trusted him and felt really good but it nearly killed me. There were times when I just wanted to die.”
His face was rebuilt and funded by the sale of Pete’s £2.5million Notting Hill home.
It took 19 months to fix his face. He said: “I was absolutely suicidal. I was dosing myself up on sleeping pills, taking 30 before I went under the anaesthetic hoping I would die. Before every op they said I might wake and find my lips amputated. So the first thing I did was feel and touch to see if they were still there.”
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After the operations he went straight into the Big Brother house before suffering a nervous breakdown when he was booted out.
He said: “I retreated into a hotel and went cold turkey from all the drugs and didn’t sleep for 29 days.”
In recent years, as Pete’s savings and friends dwindled, Lynne had been his rock, putting him up for days at a time. But despite the reservations of colleagues, his longed-for comeback was finally set to happen.
He was due to appear on ITV’s Loose Women on Monday with a box-set of Dead or Alive’s back catalogue due for release on Friday.
In one of his final tweets his excitement was clear: “Counting down the days . . .