Dead Or Alive – It’s Been Hours Now EP

10th February 2022 · 1980s, 1982, Music

Until last night I had forgotten just what a brilliant record this is. I hadn’t heard it in the best part of 40 years.

The tribal beat of those drums, the chiming of Wayne Hussey’s guitar, the shuddering baritone, the transgressive images created by that opening lyric: “Here we are on your floor at dawn, red marks all over our faces… I guess we went too far this time.”

At the time it came out in 1982, Dead Or Alive were the latest off the post-punk production line in Liverpool – a new name to add to Echo & The Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and The Mighty Wah!

And their androgynous frontman Pete Burns was the latest loudmouthed Scouser in a line that began with Ian McCulloch, Julian Cope and Pete Wylie.

In fact Burns had started out with Cope and Wylie in a group called the Mystery Girls, who played a solitary gig in 1977 (supporting Sham 69) before breaking up.

He returned two years later with a new group, Nightmares In Wax who made their debut (supporting Wire) in 1979.

Changing their name to Dead Or Alive, they pioneered a murky, gloomy, proto-goth sound – aided by the presence of future Mission frontman Wayne Hussey on guitar – that reached its apotheosis with this, the opening (and, in dubbed-up second version, closing) track from a fantastic EP in 1982 that prefigures bands like The Cult and The Mission.

It still sounds fantastic today and at the time I expected them to become as big as their peers like the Sisters Of Mercy. Instead they went in a completely different – and far more successful – direction.

If you listen closely you might be able to hear the germs of the group’s subsequent evolution via synthpop into a dance act. But nobody could quite predict their transformation into a Stock, Aitken & Waterman disco revival act with the chart topping pop hit You Spin Me Round barely a couple of years after this.

Nor the transformation of Burns himself into a larger than life TV personality via Big Brother and an addiction to cosmetic surgery that eventually contributed to his death at the age of 57.

He always claimed that Boy George had appropriated his look but, after Burns had gone bankrupt and been evicted from his rented home in later life, apparently it was George who paid for his funeral.