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.