Pete Burns lived in extremis, not by volume or spectacle alone, but in the way he fractured and recomposed the cultural image of the pop star. In Dead Or Alive: Here’s Looking At You, Moonboy Publications and photographer Paul Cox resurrect those ruptures, offering 314 images: rare, raw, radiant, where the human body is both stage and manifesto. Burns was “feminine, masculine, vulnerable, fierce and beautiful,” all at once, and Cox’s lens reminds us that contradiction was the very essence of his coherence.
What strikes immediately is the visual audacity: post-New Romantic gloss meeting punk’s skeletal core, but swathed in couture that rejected safety and begged confrontation. Westwood and Galliano dress the body like armour, yet Burns wears them as an arsenal of ideas. Here the politics of appearance precede the politics of discourse. Before the lexicon of non-binary identity had entered the mainstream, Burns had already made himself a living pronoun, shifting, refusing capture, staking territory in television studios, magazine covers, and clubs alike. Cox frames this not as mere spectacle but as declaration.
The photographer himself acknowledges the paradox: “Photo shoots with Pete Burns and Dead or Alive were fun, chaotic, and always a challenge,” he says. “Between Pete and me, we created some visually striking images.” In the pages, we see not only the gloss of Smash Hits covers or the neon dazzle of music video sets, but quieter fragments: Pete with his parents, annotations on contact sheets, the scrawl of a hand unguarded. These inclusions transform the book into something less retrospective than reliquary.
Burns’ fame was both concentrated and diffuse. You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) still orbits global memory and lights up dance floors; its 40th anniversary underscoring the song’s enduring legacy. Yet Cox’s photographs situate the hit inside a larger cultural matrix, where the so-called minor gestures: poses, garments, glances, were equal agents of disruption. A session with Morrissey, captioned as “The Very Odd Couple,” embodies this perfectly: two figures from opposite poles of British pop, converging, sparring, laughing, uneasy, yet immortalised.
The broader context is crucial. Paul Cox’s career arcs across late 20th-century music photography: Bolan, Bowie, Siouxsie, Cocteau Twins, Boy George…yet Burns remains singular. Perhaps because he understood more deeply than most that to be photographed is to be written into the world’s eye, and that survival depends on controlling the script of visibility.
Moonboy presents the book as a limited-edition object: 224 pages, 314 photos (see some samples at the end of this article), dust jacket with Matrix emboss, inserts of posters and bookmarks. This book celebrates the revival of a body and a style that prefigured today’s cultural debates. In Burns’ gaze, arch, amused, unyielding, we encounter a demand that the present has yet to answer.
This care is recognition that the archive must resist dilution. At a time when image circulates endlessly, stripped of aura, such material presence matters. Susan Sontag once insisted in On Photography that photographs are “inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” Cox’s images, sequenced and contextualised here, remind us that Burns was himself an inexhaustible invitation: perpetually becoming, never reducible.
(All I know is that to me, these photos look like lots of fun.)
Advance orders are being taken now here. This is an edition of only 1000 copies, and all will include two posters and two bookmarks. There is an option to add a limited, numbered print signed by the photographer—full details and a preview are available on the Moonboy website.
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