DEAD OR ALIVE
FRAGILE/UNBREAKABLE: THE FRAGILE MIXES
JE
DEMON
★★★☆/★★
DOA’s final LP Fragile exemplifies the sadness of Pete Burns’ latter career. Despite suffering from ME-type symptoms, I Paralyze and Hit And Run Lover are explosive Hi-NRG, which deserved to catapult Burns back into the charts. Instead, he was ordered to fill half of Fragile with old hits – only to discover he didn’t own the rights, so he’d have to re-record them instead. The result is an album of six fantastic new tunes, full of hilarious grandstanding about his beauty and talent, and six revamps (with the emphasis very much on the “vamps”.) And, after all that, Fragile was only released in Japan until now. The frustrations of re-recording his classics would have led lesser mortals to coast on the new versions, but Lover Come Back To Me is more intensely pure-pop than the original and even the new You Spin Me Round stands strong. But the album is still disconcerting: someone should have let Burns create a whole new LP and released the re-recordings separately. This would have dispensed with the unnecessary remix album Unbreakable Burns’ Japanese label commissioned, where none of the remixers are sympathetic to his nuance and vision.