He's the flamboyantly enhanced 1980s icon who makes Leslie Ash look subtle. Pete Burns is back and still fighting to be an individual, he tells Sylvia Patterson

He looks, up-close, like a prosthetic head perched on the desk of a cautionary cosmetic surgeon: "Beware: Too Much, Folks, And THIS Could Happen To You!" There's a taut, pink-glossed rubber ring where his lips once were, with a smile you might call explosive. The nose is tiny; two parallel lines with ovals on the end. Everything else is phenomenally pretty; peachy skin, intoxicating, deep-brown almond eyes, jet-black wig feathering into his jawline. He's wearing a dazzling, red, white and blue jump suit — motifed with cartoon stars — off at one shoulder, white vest underneath, all tattooed, manly shoulder. He looks like a transsexual madman, but he isn't.

"I'll be sitting in a restaurant," says Pete Burns, in his deepest, caustic scouse, puffing on a Marlboro Light, "and some goon, some absolute bricklayer will stagger through the door and go, ‘Should I get my lips done or me penis enlarged?' I'm like, ‘Y'know, mate? I don't give a fuck if you have our arsehole enlarged’. I’m not the boy next door. If you want the boy next door, fucking go next door."

Pete Burns’ gob is famous again, in every way, an appearance on last year’s Never Mind The Buzzcocks re-igniting a reputation as wither-tongued überfreak. What a shame, for the rest of us, that he "constantly" turns down reality TV; "I still have a career, and I don't really do reality." Latest refusal was Reborn In The USA.

"I Used To Be A Celebrity, Get Me Back In There," he snorts. "You can see actual insanity in Sonia's eyes, almost a Sunset Boulevard situation. But I've more contempt for the people who organised it..."

Pop star, fashion moll, sometime sexually flexible electro pioneer, Pete Burns, 43, has been "famous, infamous and now I'm having a whirlwind courtship with the world". In 1985 he was Britain's biggest eye-patched pop-exotic, No 1 across the globe with Dead Or Alive's You Spin Me Round (Like A Record). Mostly, Pete hated fame.

"I did not understand," he baulks, across a conference table in his publicist's office, "how 50-year-old mothers could pledge undying love and present me with their babies, on my doorstep."

Come the 1990s, he "bowed out" of fame in Britain and, ever since, he's been "washed up in a wool shop in Carlisle" ie sustained himself internationally, mostly in Japan (to date selling six million albums). With the 1980s revival rolling on, club-kids dressing up again, Facelift Diaries the housewives' favourite and Dead Or Alive's forthcoming greatest hits, Evolution, he's suddenly, relevantly, back. New to involvement in foaming Celeb World, he's boggled by identikit pop culture, bewildered by the mags — "Hello, Goodbye, Tara, Piss Off" — wondering, like everyone else, whatever happened to the alien-pop-star. (He only likes "bad-tempered, nutty, ridiculous" Christina and Courtney.)

"Since I've been on TV," he's musing, "I've been offered free flights to attend fashion shows. One young, unknown designer sent a fucking limo round my house. So I could be a paparazzi opportunity. I ain't going. It's absurd. I live a quiet, daytime life. I walk everywhere. I lie down. I wash socks. I fry an egg."

Pete Burns is a great deal more than a verbal carpet bomb, a warm, direct, mesmerisingly articulate half-man/half-drag queen, who's spent a lifetime in a category of one. He's been married, for 20-odd years, to Lynne: "I really love her and she loves me back and why shouldn't she? Cos I'm not Brad Pitt?" His physical obsessions are fuelled by "the template — Keith Richards. I cannot accept just looking at the same thing, decaying." To this end, he runs miles through Hyde Park every day, works "like a fucking dog" in the gym, plus... "Lip enlargement, nose reduction, Botox and the odd glyceric acid peel," he chirps, "but that's absolutely all I've had done. And I've got a signed affidavit by my surgeon before the pictures run with the arrows everywhere. It's boredom. I'm artistic. Maybe my reds are redder than other people's reds. I don't consider myself mildly eccentric. I'm not a camp, throwaway queen, I'm not in Neverland, I'm not Jennifer Lopez with three people to pluck my eyebrows. I've made myself what I want to be, not everybody's cup of tea. And people wanna have a look at me. I fully accept that. People have always wanted to have a look at me."

One early-1970s September, 14-year-old Pete Burns turned up to his all-boys suburban school with no eyebrows, Harmony-red hair and one gigantic earring. Summoned immediately to the headmaster's office, he thought, "`Fuck this for a game o' conkers, I'm off' and I never went back." He ran fashion boutiques and became "a face on the scene" of the avant-garde. The day he was No 1, hailing a taxi, he was approached by a gang of Toxteth schoolgirls. "I thought, `Haha! Autograph fiends!' and they were (voice of Sonia, aged 15), `Gerrout of this city, yer fockin' queer twat!', kicking and booting the taxi and I thought, `Well it's certainly not gonna work here!"

His family history reads like a Tolstoy trilogy. At the start of the second world war, his mother, a glamorous, Jewish-German aristocrat, sometime member of the Russian secret police with a false passport, was "forced into hiding in cellars, eating candles to fill her stomach up. But she always kept her mink coat. And her hairdresser." She fled Hitler's Holocaust "by marrying the first British soldier who came along" (Dad, Mr Burns, a Scotsman). Pete spoke German until aged five, local kids surrounding the house "shouting ‘Heil Hitler!' for days outside the door". He'd turn up to primary school "wearing a red Indian headdress. And I would not remove it. I was just... different." Approaching adolescence, mum investigated the fate of her father and had a breakdown (he'd been tortured, naked, in a snow-covered Berlin school yard). She was prescribed Valium, recommended sherry and spiralled into a "serious alcoholism and cross-addiction to Valium, Mogadon, Librium, all encouraged". (She died, in 1989, from cancer.)

Those few years were totally horrendous," says Pete, "but seeing that rage in her, this unexploded bomb, I wasn't gonna unleash those demons with substances. I'm still very jumpy around people who are pissed out their heads. When I'd see people shovelling up the coke, acid, Es, Jack Daniels, Jägermeister — I'd think, `There goes my mother'. And I've no urge. My behavioural problems are non-existent because all my freakiness, I guess, is manifested in a visual way. And I never have come unravelled."

Last year, celebrity internet gossip site Popbitch reported that Pete Burns had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He responded by publishing on his own website the office and mobile phone numbers of the nameless, elusive Popbitch staff "and linked it to 73 other celebrity websites": (Since removed, after an accepted apology.) The report, he says, "was hilarious", but he wasn't in the mood, the 3am Girls/tabloid calls arriving the morning his wife's mother dropped dead. Back in the 1980s, many of Pete's peers "went cuckoo". Julian Cope thought he was a city centre. Boy George thought he was a kettle. "I always knew exactly who and what I was," grins Pete, "and it wasn't a kettle."

Are you still pals with Morrissey? "No. I got a fur coat and he blew up."

Every day, Pete Burns battles the cultural holocaust of conformity. "I fight for the right to be an individual. I have to be meself. I just had... no other be." To other individuals, he says: "Don't ever lose your nerve." These days, Pete's sure he's "either too old or too weird" for the mainstream, finding daytime radio "unbelievably resistant" to the helium-hectic, re-release Spin Me.

"But if anybody out there thinks," he beams, "by not playing my record they're gonna find me destitute on a corner of Hyde Parks with a trolley full of designer clothes, it ain't gonna happen. It's been a Cinderella thing. I was scrubbing the hearth trying to make it in music. No fucking fairy godmother came down my chimney and said, `You'll go the ball'. I got on the fucking guest list meself and made me own dress to go in."