Survivor

Nineteen seventyeight should have been Cidny Bullens' year, until a record label acquisition brought it to a crashing halt. Now, as Charles Donovan discovers, the musician who once had to choose between Dylan and Elton is back... with a difference, a new album, and 2023's most compelling rock memoir

If you were me, what would you do/You look in the mirror and it’s not really you.” It’s a couplet from a new song, The Gender Line, which captures a big part of the story of rock singer/ songwriter/guitarist, Cidny Bullens.

Bullens, a vocalist in Elton John’s mid-70s touring band (he’s also on Don’t Go Breaking My Heart and Blue Moves), almost blazed a trail of glory as a rock star, twice Grammy-nominated in his twenties. He endured record label shenanigans, addiction, and profound loss before a revival in the late 90s. Now he’s published the memoir TransElectric: My Life As A Cosmic Rock Star and is issuing an album which is his seventh and his first. That’ll make sense later; for now, we introduce ourselves on a humid July afternoon, he in Nashville, I in London. He’s a markedly young 73, with kind, expressive eyes, answering questions open-heartedly and without wariness.

He tells me his lifetime of journaling and the one-man (or “One Wo/Man”, as it was styled) show he performed in the 2010s, meant the framework for TransElectric was already in place. In it, he writes vividly of his early life as Cynthia, known as Cindy, raised the second daughter of five siblings in a straight-laced Massachusetts family. His rock identity was sparked by a sense of connection to Mick Jagger.

“The Beatles opened me up to a musical pathway,” he says, “but the Stones I responded viscerally to. I really did think there was some kind of projection from me to Mick Jagger. I had the big lips, I had the hips, I could dance like him. I had already started listening to John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and Willie Dixon, but the Stones really embodied a different way of listening to R&B and blues.”