Survivor
Record Collector|October 2023
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
Survivor

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.”

Denne historien er fra October 2023-utgaven av Record Collector.

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Denne historien er fra October 2023-utgaven av Record Collector.

Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.

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Paperback Blighters - The books every record collector should read.
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The books every record collector should read. Vinyl, you may have heard, has made a big comeback. In 2022, sales of vinyl albums surpassed compact discs (CDs) for the first time in more than three decades in terms of global revenue, racking up more than $1.2bn.

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"Beware the Savage Lure/of 1984..." - David Bowie is one of the most venerated musicians ever. But even he had his bad periods.
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"Beware the Savage Lure/of 1984..." - David Bowie is one of the most venerated musicians ever. But even he had his bad periods.

David Bowie is one of the most venerated musicians ever. But even he had his bad periods. For many, 1984 remains the nadir of his Phil Collins” phase; an artistic/sartonial/tonsorial disaster area. But was it really that awful? Forty years on, Matt Phillips explores Bowie's so-called annus horribilis.

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7"  Heaven & Hell the Story of the 45 - The 45 turns 75 this year. Matthew Quinlan charts its history, recalling the RPM wars and two belligerent titans who went into battle over the speed of spinning sound
Record Collector

7" Heaven & Hell the Story of the 45 - The 45 turns 75 this year. Matthew Quinlan charts its history, recalling the RPM wars and two belligerent titans who went into battle over the speed of spinning sound

Someone needs to come and empty the bins behind the Lloyds Bank branch in Kingston-upon-Thames. It’s been raining and flattened cardboard slumps next to a flytipped air conditioning unit and a rusting clothes rack. There are two signs at head height on the red brick wall. One warns that you’ll be clamped if you park here; the other, a stainless-steel plaque, marks Nipper’s 100th birthday. Nipper, the dog at the heart of the HMV and RCA Victor logos, was a white terrier with chocolate brown ears, maybe a Jack Russell, Smooth Fox, or Bull Terrier, more likely a mix. This is his final resting place. He was buried under a mulberry tree but, you know, urban sprawl, progress, etc. The plaque was unveiled by the Chairman of HMV Stores on 15 August 1984, while Captain Sensible, Janice Long, and a Nipper doppelganger looked on. Round the corner, at HMV and Our Price, George Michael’s Careless Whisper was flying off the shelves, and every copy turned at 45 RPM.

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STARS ON 45s
Record Collector

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Record Collector

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Young American
Record Collector

Young American

A serendipitous collaboration with David Bowie in 1974 kick-started Luther Vandross' recording career. But he still faced an uphill struggle to succeed as a solo artist. Charles Waring talks to some of the singer's most trusted collaborators about his early years and how he battled to be heard....

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MOD ALMIGHTY
Record Collector

MOD ALMIGHTY

Steve Ellis began his career as a mod in flower-power clobber as frontman of chart-toppers Love Affair. Quitting in 1970, he worked with The Who's Roger Daltrey then gave up music to become a docker before a near-death experience. Interest in his work was rekindled after hooking up with long-time fan Paul Weller. Lois Wilson hears how his romance with music endures.

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ANARCHISTS IN THE UK
Record Collector

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Record Collector

The boy with the thorn in his side

David Cassidy was arguably the biggest solo star of the immediate post-Beatles era, yet his fame as well as his boyish good looks and extracurricular excessesovershadow the excellence of his breathily intimate, musically accomplished records. Simon Goddard, RC contributor and author of an acclaimed series of books on David Bowie, hails the work of the tortured pop idol

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"I COULD JUST THROW MUD AT THE WALL"
Record Collector

"I COULD JUST THROW MUD AT THE WALL"

There's little sign of slowing down from the 19-year-old Pete Townshend. Currently on the go: multi-media project The Age Of Anxiety; a dance production of Quadrophenia; and Pete Townshend Live In Concert 1985-2001, a 14-disc boxset of his solo in-concert recordings. Not, he admits, that his every whim and fancy are worth deeper exploration. \"Some of them are good ideas, some of them are pretty dumb,\"

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