Cyndi Lauper recalls how Bad Company/Free made her be a singer

Currently on her farewell tour, the American singer Cyndi Lauper is one of the most important Pop musicians from the past decades. She sold an estimated amount of more than 50 million records worldwide and has hits like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, “Time After Time”, “True Colors” and “All Through The Night”.

Curiously, she was influenced by many different music styles and first discovered that she could be a lead singer when she sang Free and Bad Company songs.

Cyndi Lauper recalls how Bad Company/Free made her be a singer

She recalled that story in an interview with Rolling Stone but she didn’t reveal which songs were. She mentioned them when asked about other groups that would also be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year.

“(…) Bad Company, my first gig as a lead singer, not a background singer, was singing one of their songs. I always wanted to be a background singer, like Merry Clayton. I just loved Merry Clayton growing up. I started to feel like background singers had more freedom than lead singers because you could get to really sing high. It was cool in the background. And then because I wasn’t good at dancing in platforms, and I used to fall a lot…that helped me learn how to talk to the audience, because if you fall, you gotta say something.”

She continued:

“I got the job to be the lead singer because the manager said, “Look, you see that girl in the back who can’t dance, but sings really good? Just make her the lead singer.” That’s what happened. I sang a Free song and a Bad Company song. Yeah (It will be a full circle moment). It was at the Boardy Barn in front of 5,000 nickel beer-drinking folks in the Hamptons. I remember being terrified. But as soon as I started swinging that tambourine to the rhythm and singing, that was it. I stepped off the platform, and I was the lead singer,” Cyndi Lauper said.

During the same conversation she said she supports the induction of artists that were not essentially from Rock and Roll music. She believes that Rock and Roll is any kind of music that changes the world and causes impact, like Hip-Hop did, for example.

After Free came to an end, the band’s vocalist Paul Rodgers and the drummer Simon Kirke got together to form Bad Company, which like Free would also become one of the most important Rock bands of all time.