IS this the face that launched a thousand strips? Lithe and lovely, his face a lavish can-vas of charged eroticism, Pete Burns plumps his pert derrieré on a curiously receptive, black leather chaise lounge. Like actor James Woods French-kissing a living, breathing TV screen, it's a scene straight out of David Cronenberg's beautifully warped Videodrome, an instant collapse of normality. Be honest; if you were furniture - even with the most rudimentary awareness - you'd be lusting to cradle Pete's butt too.

But valuing discretion (and not being sectioned), I keep my fantasies firmly private, and heavily tranquillised courtesy of an enormous whisky and soda. The keyword here is 'decorum', not intrusive, teenage tawdriness.

Cut to a deep, long-sustained sigh, and the faintest sheen of filmy perspiration misting Pete's flawless - even at nine in the morning - maquillage.

It's not exasperation; enviably, he's just completed his five-mile, morning run, but still drips the shocking composure of a high-end, haute-couture Hermes mannequin. So he should; in addition to twenty years of deserved celebrity, Pete's been blessed with an inborn sense of gorgeous singularity chic. Oh, we won't call it style; that word's far too vapid and easily taken hostage, the preferred reserve of clueless bling-bling addicts from pole to pole. As passionate as pre-orgasmic spunk boiling in the scrotum, Pete's personal self-awareness is a work of art of progress, staking out individual territories no pop star has dreamed before. Okay, his music may be necessarily formulaic - he's trapped, after all, by the straitjacket of his own success - but in terms of image control, he's more kamikaze radical than Britpop and Warhol combined.

By whose standards? Well, more than ninety percent of this simpering, scared-of-its-own-shadow nation, sweethearts. Sure, the previous summer, we'd been sweetly seduced by Culture Club's Do you Really Want To Hurt Me?, a lilting slice of reggae-lite from cuddlesome, pantomime dame gender-blender Boy George, a superlative, Tetley Tranny antidote to real life and the nasty, burning-flesh facts of the recent, Falklands War. Big deal. If a huge hunk in a skirt thrilled grannies, darker players like Soft Cell cut to the chase and repression of deviant, dump-the-status-quo sexualities. Still, Marc - bless his deeply talented heart - lacked Pete's raw, meat-packing, crossover physicality.

Popping up like a phallic, unsuspected ice-berg, Dead or Alive's TV debut sank the limp-wrested Titanic that was New Romanticism overnight. Large, charged and predating Frankie Goes to Hollywood with a take-no survivors ballsiness, Pete burnt up the small screen and straight notions of homo-helplessness. Had he come from nowhere, some radiant, leper messiah gorged on his own godliness? Hardly; let's descend near Liverpool, circa 1973, and let our very own, glam-schlock Salomé slowly pull back his veils...

"Cathartic moments? I broke my arm at eleven and stayed home from school as a semi-invalid and Bowie appeared on TV with shaved eyebrows, a feather boa and red hair. Before I knew it, it was off with my eyebrows, on with hair dye and getting a hot pin to pierce my ear.

The result? "A 'Hitchcock Moment' back at school when I was put alone in a classroom and had the entire school parade past me. Finally, they summoned me to the headmaster's office. But after fifteen minutes I thought 'This is no time to keep a girl waiting' and I just pissed off and never went back'." Why should he? School boot camps - like consumer society now - either demonise or break dissenters. By contrast, Lady Sasha's youth - and Pete's - was a gorgeous, pre-AIDS, polysexual pandemonium where anything went. "That's true," Pete grins, "but there isn't really that much happening now. I'm not going to play all our yesterdays, but I don't see Will Young or Jade Goody inspiring anyone to change their lives. I know it's a nation of troglodytes, but mediocrity's the main catalyst of creativity; the more people are held down, it's like shaking a bottle of champagne, eventually the cork comes off and they explode. Recently, I've been really excited by the electroclash movement and Nag Nag Nag. I thought, 'Great, there's some good freaks here' but I was slightly disillusioned when I saw them getting changed in the toilets; they should have arrived in those ridiculous outfits and seen the way it affected people's perceptions. Personally, Bowie's impact changed my life and I drifted from there to the height of punk; it's been like a great big tornado that's brought me to where I am today."

Actually, the transition wasn't quite so seamless; Pete, like Holly Johnson and other future Liverpool 'faces' cut his teeth as an object of simultaneous veneration and abuse on the local club scene, constantly testing the tolerance of Joe Public en route to work at Matthew Street's legendary Probe Records. Mercifully, he survived; deadheads learned to their cost that seemingly sacrificial limbs bite back. Cue a brief, musical spring-board with the Mystery Girls - an OTT glam trio with Pete (Wah Heat) Wylie and Julian (Teardrop Explodes) Cope, before disco sucked him to its bosom and spat him snarlingly loose on the charts.

Predictably, he ate them up. Despite the earnest rants of counsellors, sex therapists and support groups ad nauseum, the only fear worth mentioning is death, not what people think of you or what you do with your dick. So why not - like Pete - test cliched role play to destruction, publicly and privately? He nods, thoughtfully. "I think categorizing yourself in a very defiant way - with whatever label - is really putting yourself in a box, and things in boxes are very easy to deal with.

Ultimately, life is far too short to draw any line rigidly on the floor and say, ‘This is what I am and this is forever', because you'll only have more explaining to do when it's written down in stone, then eventually used against you when you've changed your mind. That's why people feel they need to confess in the media and chat shows. We spend so much time talking about what we are, were and might be we're not actually developing as human beings."

Exactly. Surviving media meltdown takes balls and brains, the hallmarks of Pete's seminal, movie influences, Cabaret and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, both master classes in building fearless facades. "People don't get Baby Jane," Pete laughs. "For me, Bette Davis was giving full-out glamour but no one was ready for it. Even sagging jowls and wrinkles, it's still glamour, just on a level the world can't understand."

Still, as he insists, "The real Pete Burns - he ain't for sale, because celebrity, far from freeing artistic wings, nails them down. I'll always be the "Spin Me Round' guy, and frankly, it's just as repetitive as working on Selfridges' MAC counter. Celebrity's a very vacuous and empty thing; you think it's gonna change your life, but your shit still stinks in the morning."

Maybe so, but Pete's still staying one step ahead of our shared, homogenous hell via his inspired commitment to living performance art, marrying his personal aesthetics to plastic surgery. Spitting on the controlled, de-eroticised categories modern sex is becoming, he's spunkily omnisexual, a testament to the bloody but empowering gifts of the knife.

If what we are is what we're prepared to bleed for - step forward, Osama and George Dubya - then Pete's proved his sincerity time after time. What a tragedy none of our current flop stars (Mikey Jackson even denies his drastic plastic disasters) can say the same.