Darryl Bullock

DESCRIBED AS ‘A VERITABLE BARD OF THE BENT, BROKEN AND BAROQUE’ by Andy Partridge (XTC), Darryl W. Bullock (60) is an award-winning author and feature writer who specialises in pop music history and LGBTQ issues.

He has written for publications including The Guardian, Pitchfork, Record Collector, The Quietus, The Bath Chronicle, The Bristol Magazine, The Bristol Evening Post, Literary Hub, The Pink Paper, Songwriter Magazine, The Spark, Venue, We Are Family Magazine, The Western Daily Press, and many others. He has been profiled in The Guardian, The Sunday Times and GT, and has featured on BBC One, Channel 4, and on many local and national radio and television programmes. In June 2024 he was commissioned to write for musician Sam Smith’s charity website The Pink House.

Noted for his ‘landmark scholarship’ (Melbourne Queer Film Festival), Darryl is the author of eight books including Florence Foster Jenkins: The Life of the World’s Worst Opera Singer (Duckworth-Overlook, 2016), David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music (Duckworth-Overlook, 2017, winner of the 2023 ShoutOut Radio Listener’s Award for Best Literary Work), The Infamous Cherry Sisters: The Worst Act in Vaudeville (McFarland and Co., 2019), The Velvet Mafia: The Gay Men Who Ran the Swinging 60s (Omnibus Press, 2021, the winner of the highly-coveted Penderyn Music Book Prize 2022), and Pride, Pop and Politics (Omnibus Press, 2022, nominated for the Penderyn Music Book Prize 2023). His latest, Queer Blues: The Hidden Figures of Early Blues Music, was published by Omnibus Press in July 2023.

A music obsessive, between 2018 and January 2024 he was the host of The World’s Worst Records Radio Show on internet radio station Sheena’s Jungle Room/WFMU, and posts regularly on his blog, also called The World’s Worst Records: www.worldsworstrecords.blogspot.com