KT TUNSTALL

KT Tunstall has a rare gift. We knew that anyway, but on this occasion we're talking about the one that allows this treasured artist to turn a nostalgic trip back to her debut album of 20 years ago into the next installment of a career that has never stopped being uniquely inventive and adventurous.

The new Stargazer edition of KT's magical first record from late 2004, Eye To The Telescope, is not only a fitting celebration of one of the most striking and successful opening musical statements of the 21st century, but also a snapshot of where she has travelled since, with the inclusion of three previously unreleased tracks that she has delicately flavored with the ingredients of her modern-day creative persona.

"You don't think about whether anyone's going to still be listening to you 20 years later," she reflects. "I have to say I'm quite grateful that that's never played on my mind. I've just done my best, making albums. I'm also aware that this is sort of a once in a lifetime experience, because I'm certainly going to be in different shape when I'm doing the 50th anniversary of this record!"

One of those fresh selections is the title track the album never had, completed by KT for this augmented package with production by longtime collaborator Martin Terefe. It features gorgeous new elements of orchestration by original arranger David Davidson and an equally inspired wooden flute feature by British jazz luminary Shabaka. Tunstall has lovingly completed two other songs that she wrote during the ETTT songwriting sessions, 'Cancerian' and 'Anything At All.'

All three tracks form the perfect moving walkway to take us from the KT we first knew to the one who continues to find and conquer new horizons. And all this in the year in which she won the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection and became a West End musical composer, with her score for Clueless, which opened at the Trafalgar Theatre in February and has a UK tour set for 2026.

She also has other musical theatre composition projects in the pipeline such as Saving Grace with fellow Scot Craig Ferguson at the helm, suggesting this new avenue of her career is certainly set to continue.

The BRIT Award winner had amassed many years of musical experiences by the time that debut record became a national and international sensation, with worldwide album sales of five million. Those proverbial 10,000 hours in pubs, clubs, bars, on streets, and in indie and experimental bands, as well as providing vocals and songwriting collaborations for klezmer outfit Oi Va Voi, were full of the customary setbacks and putdowns, but they turned out to be the perfect primer for her official arrival as a solo artist at the age of 29.

When KT famously stood in as a late replacement for rapper NAS on Later With Jools Holland, it led to a performance of the album's soon-to-be first single 'Black Horse and the Cherry Tree' that has become the stuff of legend, not to mention one of the digital world's very first viral moments. On its 20th anniversary, she called it "the night that changed my life."

The album crept onto the UK chart in January 2005, but didn't make the top ten for the first time until four months later, by which time it had already shipped nearly a quarter of a million copies in Britain alone. It eventually reached No.3 on two occasions, five months apart. On Christmas Eve that year, it sold its millionth copy in the UK, and in September 2006, won a prestigious Platinum Europe Award from trade body the IFPI for one million shipments across Europe.

As trademark singles such as 'Other Side Of The World' and 'Suddenly I See' continued to arrive, the album soon began to sound like a greatest hits. All the more so when the latter song was embedded into the opening scene, and into the cultural consciousness of the world, of the mega-hit movie and now modern classic, The Devil Wears Prada.

When KT performed the whole of Eye To The Telescope in sequence, in unforgettable, guest star-packed shows at both Glasgow's legendary Barrowlands and then on her 50th birthday party at the Royal Albert Hall, the audience was note- and word perfect from first song to last.

Back in 2006, she performed 'Suddenly I See' at the BRIT Awards, where Tunstall had four nominations, and she will tell you that, "flabbergasted" as she was to go home with the British Female Solo Artist trophy, she was almost as excited to see Prince perform up close and personal.

That's the kind of thing that makes KT's music so uniquely connected with her audience, because she's a music nut like they are, and regards her own breakthrough with that same sense of wonder. As she told Billboard at the time: "I’ve been asked before if I feel like a new artist, [even though] I’ve been doing this for the best part of ten years. But I do. I’ve never made an album before, and I’ve only recently played to people who know the songs and the words."

That confident and charismatic performance on Later was, for many, the first sighting of an artist whose live performances have few equals. To this day, to see KT live is to admire the troubadour charm she perfected as a busker on the streets of Fife and in Burlington, Vermont, where she finished high school for a year at Kent School.

"I got my first big confidence boost playing there, on street corners and in cafés, because Americans are so openly effusive if they like you," she said. Early in her success, Tunstall would remark that whatever happened to her recording career, she was safe in the knowledge that she could always be a live entertainer.

These days, she muses: "I think busking is one of the best performance training programs you can go through. It teaches you that you have to earn people's attention.  You’re not entitled to that, you have to be good enough to spark their interest."

The long-tail success of Eye To The Telescope meant that her second album, Drastic Fantastic, didn't come out until 2007, although the gap was bridged with the Acoustic Extravaganza collection of B-sides, acoustic versions and other collectables, named after the nights she used to put on in Edinburgh before she was signed.

Unlike its slow-burning predecessor, it crashed into the UK chart at No.3 and made top tens worldwide, including in the US. On its release, she talked about the knowledge she had put into practice since becoming successful. "I felt after three years of touring experience I was able to go into the studio and click into the headspace of singing live," she said. "It’s always been that recording stuff is a vehicle for people to get into the songs so they can enjoy the gigs more."  

Amid a welter of collaborations and charity projects (and after her first time off for years, traveling through the Arctic, South America and India), her third studio album was 2010's UK top five entry Tiger Suit. Initial sessions took place in the Bowie-imbued sanctuary of Hansa Studios in Berlin. Singles included 'Fade Like A Shadow' and 'Glamour Puss,' on a record that she playfully said sounded like Eddie Cochran working with Leftfield. "Fierce, claws-out fun," said The Guardian.

In what was fast becoming an expansive and varied body of work, 2013 brought the far more pensive Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon, which she co-produced in two sessions with the revered Howe Gelb at Wavelab studio in Tucson, Arizona.

It was, she said, "a pleasure to finally experience recording to tape, definitely the easiest album I’ve made, and the purest since my first one, in terms of being left alone to make it. It was also wonderful being in Tucson. The desert there is a transporter, it’s a portal to something. It’s just a completely different pace of life."

Simply pressing the repeat button is a complete anathema to an artist who remains restlessly inquisitive, and thus KT then embarked on what became a bold and audacious trilogy of albums, described as a "soul, body and mind" trio.

2015's KIN ("a power-pop gem,' ruled Rolling Stone) was followed by WAX in 2018 (which Hot Press said "features some of Tunstall’s most vital music to date") and 2022's NUT, about which she described her "amazing, crazy, painful, wonder-filled seven years making this trilogy."

Versatility to the fore as always, Tunstall continued work on the musical that would become the score for Clueless while branching out again for the exhilarating meeting of minds that was Face To Face, her 2023 collaboration with the great Suzi Quatro.

By way of determined and dedicated both in the UK and her adopted US home, she finds herself at the momentous staging post of the Stargazer Edition of the record that started it all.  

Embracing the beginning of the third decade since Eye To The Telescope became our first spyglass into KT Tunstall's world, she shares one more reflection on lessons learned. "A great gift of time and experience has been understanding that the more I am totally myself on stage the better," she says. "It feels like a bit of a superpower, because there's definitely a fire you have to walk through to be able to say with real surety, 'I have no need to be anyone else.'"