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Freak Unique: My Autobiography

by Pete Burns

3.48 of 5 stars 3.48 · rating details · 77 ratings · 13 reviews

Pete Burns was the undoubted star of Celebrity Big Brother and has recently been the subject of a documentart on ITV1. With a career spanning more than two decades, the astonishing story of his life will appeal to a wide range of people. Pete is never very far from the pages of celebrity magazines whether his latest antics make the headlines or his bizarre fashion sense ma ...more

Paperback , 288 pages

Published August 1st 2007 by John Blake (first published 2006)

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Jul 30, 2013 Taralen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

Pete Burns is my favorite musical artist of all time; he's a fascinating performer and 80s icon.
Freak Unique really showed me what a complex person Pete is. The best way I can sum him up is that he is both a wise man and an idiot. There's really no way to call him just one thing, that's something I find really likeable about him. How exactly is he wise and stupid? Well to put it simply, his philosophy about a lot of stuff is very fascinating. He makes very valid and honest comments about how he Pete Burns is my favorite musical artist of all time; he's a fascinating performer and 80s icon.
Freak Unique really showed me what a complex person Pete is. The best way I can sum him up is that he is both a wise man and an idiot. There's really no way to call him just one thing, that's something I find really likeable about him. How exactly is he wise and stupid? Well to put it simply, his philosophy about a lot of stuff is very fascinating. He makes very valid and honest comments about how he sees things and people. Unfortunately, Pete also admits his flaws with handling money; he often found himself broke and desperately needing money even at the peak of his career. But we also get to see a lighter side of Pete, such as when he described how much he did for AIDs patients and his mother who was dying of cancer. His personal life, especially when he describes his surgery disaster, is very interesting. I always got hooked when he really dove into things he had to go through or did because some of it's just so wacky and interesting, like when he was at the mental hospital.

Unfortunately, for most of the beginning of the book Pete's teenage life is described through his description of others at the time. He makes a lot of references of other musical artists and iconic figures of the era to the point where it just really drags. I would have liked if he focused more on himself in those passages. Pete also jumps around on topics a lot, making it sort of hard to follow just when certain events took place. For example, in the chapter "plastic fantastic", Pete suddenly goes on to talk about Michael. Personally I think he should have lumped his relationships with his partners (Lynne and Michael) all into one chapter or to split them up per person. Instead he just jumps around and disperses his experiences with them throughout many chapters. He also sadly doesn't really go into a whole lot about his ex-wife or why they really got divorced, nor does he really talk about Michael's personal life aside from what he does with him. If he bothers to include a picture of Michael's daughter, why doesn't he talk about her? What's Pete's relationship to her? What sort of things do Lynne, Michael and Pete do together? These are questions among many never answered or brought up in his writing.

I like this book but more details and coherency in the writing would have bumped it a higher score. It just needed to be organized better and probably longer so we could really see his life's story unfold like... Well a story. The book honestly just feels as if Pete were right here with me rambling his heart away on a lot of things--it doesn't feel like the ideas were organized in a way that made it more interesting and consistent to read in print.

I'd recommend this book to Dead or Alive or Pete Burns fans. It's very intriguing when it goes into his personal life but be warned of the numerous typos and topic jumping--it's crazy like the man himself! ...more

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Nov 15, 2013 Allison Floyd rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: spackle-for-the-void , whatever-dude

This book, I'm sorry to say, is a hot mess: meandering, disjointed, and fragmented to the point of verging on incoherence. It started out auspiciously enough, with the following quote emblazoned on the electric pink of the back of the book jacket: "I don't use makeup anymore. I use knives." Fans of course know what he's talking about. And I am a pretty hardcore Dead or Alive/early Pete Burns fan. But, man, while it appears this was written with the intervention/assistance of someone else, lament ...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Lisa Bennett rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: autobiography

It's a bit higgledy piggledy at times, the way he jumps from one thing to another mid sentance, like he's got verbal diarrea, but it's a fab book otherwise, and really interesting, when he talks about his reconstructive surgery and how he met Michael etc, really great reading. You need a strong stomach for the surgery section though, it's pretty descriptive. Read read none the less.

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May 15, 2013 Steve Womack rated it 5 of 5 stars

I thought this book was a great read, I only wish it were longer. A lot of the things Pete went through I did not know. I really admire Pete after reading this book. I would highly recommend Pete Burns fans read this one. Im ready for part 2 of his life!

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Jul 31, 2013 Mark Farley rated it 2 of 5 stars

The first impression I get from this book is that I am really enjoying it and halfway through it, I’m zipping through the childhood growth and quesyioning of his own desires and feelings upto some great music industry and touring anecdotes, and I find that I don’t have a bad thing to say about the book.

Pete is, as you can imagine from his stint in the Celebrity Big Brother house in early 2006 (a major focus of this book), is never relenting in his visceral honesty not only about himself but eve The first impression I get from this book is that I am really enjoying it and halfway through it, I’m zipping through the childhood growth and quesyioning of his own desires and feelings upto some great music industry and touring anecdotes, and I find that I don’t have a bad thing to say about the book.

Pete is, as you can imagine from his stint in the Celebrity Big Brother house in early 2006 (a major focus of this book), is never relenting in his visceral honesty not only about himself but everyone else in his life and as you can imagine from this sort of book, a few people who are not part of his life.

But what the book achieves is much more than where it ultimately fails. My problem with this firstly is the length (even if I was to initially compare this book to the format of the others I have come across), that is because it is incredibly short. There is like half (if that) of what was inside other books of this genre. The book has been padded out by John Blake at the end with a filler chapter of Pete just mouthing off about other people in the media, for example. I’m allowed to describe this as purely such as that is what the final chapter is simply called. The text is quite large and well spaced and clocks in still, at a meagre few hundred pages.

As a basic result, the book feels as though after he performed so (what’s the word...) memorably on the reality show and received offers of possible sub-literary representation, he felt compelled to hurriedly complete a project already began and perhaps put on the back burner, due to unfortunate and very graphically described medical complications and negligance from what seems to be a team of inexperienced and naive professionals.

The subject very erratically and emotially delivered about his problems and severe complications under the knife and the many drugs and anesteics that have come with the joy and pain remain both sad, unfortunate but more importantly brutally graphic, to a point where the more weak willed will want to gut wrench. It is horrific, I warn you. But then again, Pete doesn’t want that sort of folk reading about and not understanding him anyway. You want to sympathise and understand how Pete constanty rationalises what he has done to himself through the years but when he compares the act of the extent of his extreme self change to something as basically simple as cutting your hair a different or having a makeover, it is hard to sympathise. But what this book never succumbs to is a selfish, grandiose plea for sympathy, which is what I expected initially. He stays completely on page and never never falters, with respect.

It’s a Marmite sort of book. You either love it or hate it. The initial reviews on Amazon were (curiously and straight away) immediately positive. Interesting as all of the positive reviews are done by people who have solely and sadly it seems, only read his book. This is suspect and in a way, not helpful to the author.

But Pete deserves to be admired though. He is sharp, he is witty, clever, intelligent, wonderfully sarcastic and this all comes out within this book. Which is, in essence, a great representaion of what he is all about. It’s just not written or edited very well. It starts out as the great autobiography it could have been and then descends into a rushed memoir pretending to be the greater former and is actually a bitter rant from someone who perhaps has slight second thoughts about what he did and also a tremendously chaotic and intense psychological situation for the sake of a sum of money that he drastically needed.

But, the effort he has put into create his chosen life’s image (whatever you may think of it) definately shows respectable allowance for his to be duly worshipped, in whatever capacity he desires. Be that sexual, androgynous or purely case of image satisfaction through genetics and the effects of a freak unique upbringing on the unforgiving, confused streets of 70’s Liverpool with a frenetically fabulous ancestral heritage and the characters you could only dream up. Then maybe he has because as with a lot of other celebrity biographies, the wealth of pictorial evidence of his early life is sadly lacking and one person very close in his life is sadly lacking in any sort of archival way, is almost non-existant and then the only childhood photo we have before he is famous is one of him as a child. There is so sign of his odd parental unit he so visciously defends sometimes, which is a shame because they seem such an integral part of what he is/has become.

Without comparing it to the likes of Ulrika and the Jades of this world (because the book deserves at least more than that) and if I was to compare it so something of a more similar life and times, the Adam Ant book (which I am sure was much more of a ghostwritten effort that Pete’s, in fact) the book really doesn’t hold up in terms of attention to detail of what fundamentally makes him an idealistic suitable subject for any sort of decent, marketable portrait of the areas that he seems to want to acheive with baring his soul in this format. That of the complicated and very hard to sympathise subject of his confusing self image and (I’m sorry, Pete) drastic measures he has gone to to gain any sort of closure and life satisfaction at all, a vital life commodity that he really doesn’t seem to work towards, even with the most heightened stage of fame, adulation he has ever come across in his long career, his final comprehensions and contemplative current ideas don’t seem enough and you get a sense that there is still something fundamentally wrong and tragically imminent.

It is a shame because he was a wonderful breath of ignomic and enigmatic fresh air on a programme known for its often staid vacuous celebrity promotion and the way he performed, was never once failing himself of his character, so to read this in this format, is very disappointing. John Blake should have taken more of a responsibility with this and not just thought about the marketing and the rushing of this out to capitalise on what is very much (unfortunately) a temporary attention span of the average British psyche. They should have really have considered the RRP also.

At £17.99, they pretty much killed this book.
...more

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May 11, 2012 Chetty rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: autobiography , music

I got to read this autobiography by Pete Burns because I was fascinated by his image, there was something in Pete Burns that just attracted me and made me want to know more about the person he really is. It is a very interesting account of his personnal life. I think the most intriguing and crazy part for me was his childhood, how disturbing... Some extracts of the chapter which relates his surgical mishaps are quite graphic as well. Like said earlier by a previous reviewer Pete tends to skip da ...more

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Jun 05, 2011 Ben Cooke rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Considering the things this man has seen and been part of I would have expected a much more detailed and better written account of a very interesting life. The book felt (and evidently was) rushed out with little attention to detail in order to cash in on Pete's short lived reality TV fame. As someone interested in him before this I found the book a little insulting. It is riddled with errors and skims through anything that you didnt already know at such a pace that you dont really feel like you ...more

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Apr 29, 2014 Paulina Angel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Great book, really entertaining, and Pete is so funny!!

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Nov 23, 2014 Andrea rated it 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars. Pretty awful but fairly entertaining.

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Feb 24, 2008 Christophe rated it 2 of 5 stars

I learned that Pete Burns is not the best writer and is not too concerned with accuracy when it comes to dates. I still enjoyed the book. It was good vacation reading.

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Jan 28, 2008 Lorelei rated it 5 of 5 stars

Another 80's pop star autobiographey - and an entertaining one at that! A must for Pete Burns/Dead or Alive fans. :)

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Jun 07, 2012 Evan rated it 4 of 5 stars

How could anyone not enjoy Pete Burns talking about his life?

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Sep 18, 2011 Sara rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

So far I am enjoying it great book :)

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