Some people are famous for achieving something, some people are famous just for being famous and some people, let's face it, aren't famous at all. But Pete Burns, alone in this cruel, daft world has the dubious distinction to be famous for not being as famous as anybody who knows who he is thinks he should be.

There can't be many popwise persons left on this culturally claustrophobic little island of ours who don't know Pete Burns' face from somewhere. Then again, there can't be that many who know why they know him, and those of us who do know are flummoxed.

More than two years ago, I saw his picture in The Face and felt this elegant monstrosity must make it big. Over two years ago, I taped a monumentally chaotic John Peel session by Burns' Dead Or Alive and waited, convinced of its arrogant potential.

What the hell happened Pete?

"I realise you people think I'm an underachiever, " he flaps in theatrical scouse, "but I'm my own worst enemy in that sense because I won't push myself forward. It's not that I'm scared to do things - there's a whole load of things to explain why I'm not anywhere yet that have all been my doing and even now the stubborn side of my nature's jamming my foot on the brake and stopping myself getting where I should be.

"I don't know what it is, but everytime it looks like It's gonna be easy to do something, I've got to find another way of doing it. It's really perverse and causes really big crises - like, if it's easy to go out and do gigs to promote myself, I won't do it but I don't offer a set alternative to my management or agencies. I've got very clearly established in my head what I won't do but not what I will, and so people think I'm not willing to do anything. But I am! It's just that, without trying to sound pretentious, I wanna find an alternative method of breaking through.

"I can't see myself on 'Jim'll Fix It' and all those things because it isn't in my personality to do it -- I just completely refuse to be manipulated - completely! Nobody can ever make me do anything and the more people try and make me do something, the less I'll do it because then I'll start to analyse it and say 'Do I really want to do this?' And the easy way out's always 'No!'

Now this, dear reader, is somewhat hard to take, considering Pete Burns' public persona to which no description of mine could do ample justice. (Just glance at the photos and take my word that the camera is kind in portraying him slightly less podgy than he is in the flesh. How can it be that this flamboyant creature is professing a delicate reticence. If the above amounts to anything more than a romanticisation of lethargy then I think we'd better know about it now, lest we've badly misjudged Mr Burns in the past.

"My personality and everything I do aren't reflections of wanting attention - they're something completely self-motivated for an everyday life. I can't make the statement that I'm just like everybody else because I'm not like the boy next door. I have a different way of thinking and a different way of going about things but it hasn't been geared towards self-publicity.

"I've avoided that at great pains - I haven't done all the magazines, y'know, being a trendy face about town. It cripples me in lots of ways because now people are comparing me to Boy George and Haysi Fantaysi and I've been around an awful lot longer than those people, I really have . . . "

So how does Pete Burns feel about being imitated?

"Hold on, before you go on . . . " he fixes me with a searching stare. "Do you really believe that people have taken what I've created?"

Why, Pete! Such wariness! Such reserve!

"I am wary" he admits, turning my preconceptions topsy-turvy. "I know what's coming, y'know. People in papers try and start all silly bitching about me and it's really easy to start me bitching. I've got a really sharp tongue and I really try to avoid it and take a deep breath because I'm at great pains to avoid getting drawn into this thing."

I ask him to take on trust that I feel he's been used - no easy request when you've only just met for the very first time about an hour ago and he's already got me marked down as ''difficult'' - and ask, once again, whether he feels flattery or frustration at being copied?

Frustration, he admits.

"Not that I'm not getting credit but that I'm accused of taking things from other people because I think, in a way, people should know. I've never had a trumped-up idea of what I am. I don't want to be represented on paper as somebody who's blowing my own trumpet all the time, but if people are telling me it's something I've created, I'm not gonna argue about it.

The record he's talking about is Dead Or Alive's new single. "Misty Circles", a record that, if it was brilliant, would theoretically render this line of enquiry redundant the way "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" transformed Boy George from a ridiculed clothes horse to a public hero. But it isn't and it won't and anyway, despite its acceptably modern disco direction, Pete and I both harbour lurking suspicions that his persona is bound to backfire on him.

"I know I'm gonna come in for hell eventually," he philosophises, "but hopefully I'll have something to console me. That's the idea of signing to CBS-so, say, you're saying I'm a prat, at least I'm selling 40 million records and they'll be my consolation.

"But I don't really look like George, you can see that. He's just the easiest thing to compare me with because he's a bloke wearing make-up. What George does is geared to making himself look pretty and attractive to other people whereas what I do isn't, it's geared to my self- satisfaction. Things that I've done to my appearance have been unpallatable - I've worn black contact lenses and nobody finds that attractive, nobody thinks you're really sexy because you've got completely black eyes. If it looks odd, it's ugly. Like, normal blokes could find George quite attractive, y'know 'She's a bit weird but she's alright', whereas I'm too extreme, they'd say 'Ugh! Look at that dog!'

"My whole appearance isn't geared to attract boys or girls. It was geared, in a lot of ways, to keeping people away although it doesn't work like that any more because people have seen it, or similar things, before. The original motivation was to make it hard for somebody to communicate with me in the first place so, if they did manage to break through, they'd be the right type of person, I suppose. People wouldn't bother me with tedium, it would be an effort, due to my visual front, to communicate and go through the barrier, and somebody making the effort would be a lot more appreciable than somebody who just takes you on.

"Of course, that's not the case now - it's easy for me to be accepted at the moment because this white dread type thing is the current London thing, so I suppose if my motivation was really that fierce, I'd alter completely. But, then again, people setting themselves apart too obviously can end up looking complete, total prats so there's got to be a margin of serious belief in it - you can't just set yourself apart because you think that you should or because you think other people think that you should.

"What happens to me with the way I look is very strange, it's almost spiritual. I'll just feel attracted to things and have to have them to the point where it got really worrying for everyone who knows me because I became obsessed with tribal scars, I really wanted them y'know and it was only a narrow push that stopped me doing it to myself.

"I felt that I needed those marks and, although I didn't do it, everything I do is something I feel I need to do. I'd love to find out why because it isn't for attention - I dread the attention that it brings to me."

Surprisingly, Pete Burns insists that he loathes having his photograph taken and it suddenly strikes me as ironic that, should he ever become really successful, the public will assume he's hitched a ride on fashion whereas, as a stylist, he's the antithesis of the herd - an individual.

"God, this could come out all wrong," he worries, "because it I said I find my appearance a cushion against the outside world, you could think it's a phoney front, which it isn't, but I find my appearance is the clearest way of representing what I am without explaining to people. Like, if you're sitting next to somebody on the bus, they could be anything - they could be a killer and you'd never know unless they laid it on a line for you. I'm trying, in a way, to lay it on the line."

But, of course, it doesn't work that way. People can't see the person fro the mask and take it for granted that Pete Burns must be some extrovert nutter.

"It works both ways," he explains. "It stops people bothering me, but it also draws a lot of people to bother me. It has been a way of setting myself apart - I've done it since I was a child. I suppose, coming from a family of Germans, I was always apart in a way and being born and brought up in Britain, I still felt this thing about being a bit apart so, visually, I set myself apart, not because I enjoyed doing it but because it was something I felt I needed to do. I don't know why.

"You can become your own creation. I am my own creation, totally, my existence is my own creation. I've created this environment, this look, this way of life about myself so I can recreate it, y'know. I'm really a standing sign that you can overcome barriers.

Contrary to popular belief, Pete Burns feels he proved that he's no pop parasite, that he doesn't need the wild and crazy indulgences of rock'n'roll (something, he savs. he's found larzelv myth anyway), to justify his existence.

"If I didn't make it as a pop star," he says, "I could still live this life as an ordinary human being but with a strange appearance. I'm accepted now by people who once wouldn't even think I was capable of writing my name.

"This is gonna sound like I look down at them, but I look at ordinary people like parents and I wish that I was content with what they're content with; they have no worries, they live from day to day, but I want something more and what it is, I'm not sure.

"I think I want to make a mark on the world somehow, not out of ego-gratification, but I almost feel I've been put here and given these things to do it with - it's almost a responsibility to something else, otherwise I wouldn't be..." he gives himself a once-over in a mirror - ...this." Pete Burns is anxious that this responsibility shouldn't be connected with anything spiritual - he gets enough nutters sending him skeletons through the post as it is. One girl even snapped herself slashing her wrists and sent Pete the photo!

"I think I look funny, I don't look morbid," he pleads. "I don't like being a scratching board for people's hang-ups. You see, I attract the nutty side of live in every respect. I get letters from damaged people and I don't know what they see in me to identify with. I'm not damaged and, I mean, if people write down all their innermost personal thoughts and send them to me, that implies that they're really welled up with all this damage that's inside and that they see me as some kind of light that can help them out of it.

"I don't want that because I'm very flippant and I could easily say 'Oh go hang yourself' and think it's funny and then somebody might do it, y'know!"

So Pete Burns stands poised, as he has fro the last three years on the brink of becoming somebody; all that stand in his way is his reluctance to sell himself and the impression of a tantalisingly vivid image that people tend to misinterpret into false conclusions of failure. That and a decent record of course.

So what does Pete Burns really want?

"Just a way of channelling my life really, of not being without purpose, a feeling that I've contributed something, and am making a living out of it because, for somebody like me to make a living in any other way would be practically impossible because I'm not very sociable. I don't find it easy to communicate with people and, in a lot of ways, I'm really shy."

Melody Maker - May 28, 1983