A platinum-selling singer-songwriter shaped by Fife’s East Neuk, KT Tunstall is rising like a phoenix and embarking on her most personal project yet

By Cheryl Caira

Lead image credit: Cortney Armitage

KT Tunstall is in a state of flux. Poised for a new adventure after her time living in the sun-abundant, desert-dominated terrain of New Mexico, her current status is mid-move: surrounded by five dogs in a rental (including two Irish Wolfhounds, the tallest of all breeds), and awaiting a 20th-anniversary tour round Australia. 

“Life at the moment is a practice of resilience in the face of change, because moving house is just mad,” she says. “There’s this real pull between desperately trying to juice every bit of your downtime, and also stopping your brain going: ‘We’ve gotta go! We’ve gotta pack this bag!”

Rocking a fedora, husky of voice and in brilliant fettle, Tunstall is about to jet round Australia’s biggest cities, followed by a finale in New Zealand. It’s an extended birthday fiesta for her much-lauded debut album, Eye to the Telescope, which celebrated two decades in the music world in 2025. A record that resonated, it reached no.3 in the UK charts and flew off the shelves, selling over 5 million copies worldwide. 

When Tunstall and I last spoke in January 2025 she was about to perform at Glasgow’s annual Celtic Connections shindig, was writing the score for Clueless: The Musical and musing on the cosmic alignment of it all. Her Mercury Award-nominated album turned 20, Clueless the film was turning 30 and she was approaching her 50th birthday. Now she’s returned to composing for theatre, crafting songs and lyrics for a new musical, The Singer – a ‘gig-theatre’ show previewing at Dundee Rep Theatre in late July, before premiering at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Credit: Cortney Armitage

An adaptation of a short film co-written by Scottish director Cora Bissett and performer Jamie Rea, it spotlights the burgeoning creative bond between a deaf songwriter and a rock-singing Glasgow busker called Andy. Rea, a deaf artist, will play the role of Joe, telling a story inspired by his experience of music through signed-song, while highlighting the music industry’s ableist blind spots. Bissett approached Rea about writing it after the poetic way he sang using his hands brought her to tears at a Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) performance. Born in Northern Ireland, Rea had always wanted to act, so came to Glasgow and got a place at RCS on the UK’s first British Sign Language Performance degree. 

“It takes a mind like Cora Bissett’s to visualise the direction of a piece like this,” says Tunstall. “The show reminds me of the musical ONCE a little bit, where it’s much more centred around storytelling through full songs you would listen to on an album.

“You’re watching a deaf performer interact with music in a way that you might not expect. Jamie wears this amazing body pack that vibrates with the beats right on time. It’s so original and looks so cool. In the story they end up playing at Barrowlands – if I saw that there, I’d be blown away.

“Andy’s character is feeling very jaded about having had a record deal, then things not going well. Even as successful singer-songwriters and musicians, you always go through crazy peaks and troughs in your career. It’s all wildly relatable to me – the busking, the songwriting, the collaborating.”

The musical has deep parallels with Tunstall’s life in more ways than the rollercoaster of the music industry. In another instance of cosmic convergence, art has reflected her personal experience with hearing loss. The singer’s younger brother, Daniel, was born profoundly deaf, and Tunstall had researched ways he could best physically experience music through rhythm and bass vibrations. 

After years of touring heavily, she started to go through her own hearing struggles – an increasingly overwhelming sound of tinnitus in her left ear, which caused her to feel depressed and isolated. In 2021, Tunstall took the decision to pull out of a summer tour with Hall & Oates when she began developing the condition in her right ear. Devastatingly, in 2018 the musician lost the hearing in her left ear overnight – it was classed as Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss. It also gave her vertigo, causing her to lose her balance completely for several months.

I wondered if working on The Singer and being witness to the empowerment of Jamie Rea’s character has helped her navigate her own experience with hearing loss. “That’s a great question,” she says. “What I love about Jamie is he has this real impish, mischievous energy, and it reminds me of my brother. When I lost my hearing in my left ear, I remember telling Daniel and him going: ‘Oh, so you’ve only got one ear that hears!’ I was like, ‘F**k you. I’m a musician, you’re a tennis coach!’

“I do love that MO of turning to humour in the face of challenge, and that happens a lot in the show. It was a really good reminder of – it’s not the problems that usually give you the trouble, it’s your reaction to them. The year I lost my hearing was a real exercise in resilience. My parents were very tough-minded, and I love having that as part of my DNA as an adult.”

Writing an original score for the West End run of ’90s smash hit Clueless was a humbling moment for Tunstall. “I mean, I’ve been a successful songwriter. But after being a professional musician for 20 years, it felt like being a beginner again. It would be easy to think that you can just sidestep very easily into musicals and theatre, but it’s actually a very different job. I’m a solo artist, then suddenly you’re in a collaborative team and you’re not in charge. You could write two or three banger tunes that you think are doing the job, and the director can go, ‘No, that’s not getting the character where it needs to be.’ I come to projects now really eager to learn, and The Singer I particularly love, because I’m really writing songs from the heart.”

Credit: Cortney Armitage

Brought up in St Andrews, Tunstall was cut from the cloth of Fife’s grassroots indie music scene in the ’90s and early 2000s. She honed her trademark loop pedal-layering, acoustic-rock sound performing with a series of indie bands and was in tow with The Fence Collective – an influential crew of musicians who collaborated and performed together. Founded by Kenny Anderson – best known as King Creosote – it was an anti-commercial, indie-folk movement that felt like a special gang to Tunstall.

“It was Kenny Anderson who really inspired this whole scene in Fife. When I was living with Kenny’s brothers, Ian and Gordon, The Beta Band got signed, so we knew all those guys. My mum taught John Maclean, and my brother was in Steve Mason’s class.

“I had grown up all through my twenties following his lead and being totally anti-establishment. I didn’t want to sign a record deal. I was applying for arts grants and trying to get EPs together, and it was just so hard to get any momentum.”

At the time, broadcaster Vic Galloway was hosting his late-night programme on BBC Radio Scotland, giving underground and emerging artists a platform (Biffy Clyro, Chvrches and Frightened Rabbit all gained early exposure on the show). Tunstall asked Galloway to give her a chance, and he told her she wasn’t for his show – she needed to try and get played on Jo Whiley’s more mainstream airwaves. 

“So I went and did it. I was really annoyed at him, then later I realised he was completely right. It was really cutting the umbilical cord for me, having to say – I’m not really one of these guys. I’m not an outsider, punk-folk artist. I’m not making weird music in the middle of the countryside in Fife. I loved their music so much, but at the same time I was writing something much more accessible by nature, so I had to go to London to see what would happen.”

Credit: Alan West

Performing on Later… with Jools Holland in 2004 was a breakthrough moment for Tunstall. She snagged a last-minute spot on the show after rapper Nas had to drop out, and her foot-thumping performance of ‘Black Horse and the Cherry Tree’ elevated Eye to the Telescope to now multi-platinum status. A year later, she had outsold every other female solo artist in the UK, then Brit and Ivor Novello awards followed.

Tunstall has released seven albums since her heady debut, relocated to the USA (it was Venice Beach before it was Santa Fe), had her songs featured in film and TV (most memorably with ‘Suddenly I See’ in The Devil Wears Prada) and continued to tour globally with powerhouse bands. With huge success comes the pressure to go in certain creative directions and Tunstall found elements of fame challenging. Where does her relationship with the industry stand at the moment?

“I’ve had this fantasy for 20 years that comes and goes, where I just want to disappear. I remember reading this story about the jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux, who just didn’t show up to a few things then disappeared for a while. I was like, that sounds amazing. It’s definitely a strange conflict in me. I really love making things, but I’m also very focused on making sure that I’m not getting controlled too much in terms of what I make – and that’s probably impacted how many records I sell.

“I go in different directions every time I make an album, so you’re inevitably going to lose some fans, but hopefully gain new ones. But I mean, no one sells records any more. It just seems completely f***ed up – no one would go into a bookshop or cinema and expect to see a film or read a book for 5p. A lot of time and work goes into making music and I’m kind of surprised that there hasn’t been some paradigm shift to a different way, because I do think that fans want to pay the people they love. There hasn’t yet been a platform that remunerates the artist in a proper way. At the moment we’re all very focused on live performance, because that’s how most musicians make a living – but Jesus Christ, I’m not getting any younger.” 

The pains of touring aside, Tunstall’s fifth decade has been a treat so far. “It’s completely rad. It’s a great gift to have really fully realised my dream. Getting to this age and still having that feeling your potential hasn’t been reached can be painful, and I’ve certainly felt that at milestones in my past. The Royal Albert Hall show last year was that moment of self-realisation – that this was the dream. It wasn’t just to get a deal and to put a record out and to see the world. It was to be able to stay the distance and remain a musician by vocation.

“I would be lying if I said there isn’t still something in me that wants to go in new directions. I was talking to my other half, Chris, yesterday about the fact you either get to this point and start hoarding and become very sentimental about the past, or you just want to set fire to your storage unit and keep changing your life. I’m definitely the latter. 

“I always love the metaphor of shedding skin. You know that it’s painful to get out of this old skin, and there’ll be an inevitable sense of loss about a former version of yourself. But that’s what excites me about it.”

Credit: Cortney Armitage

There were some irons in the fire with a memoir Tunstall was writing last year, although she said the publishing enquiries about how many TikTok followers she could summon put her off. “It just made me want to barf. Why are people on TikTok the yardstick of whether you should write a book or not? But it’s the way of the world. And it’s accepting that it doesn’t have to be a negative thing. I’m always very torn, because I like my privacy – but there’s a lot of really funny, enlightening storytelling around the journey of where I’ve got to, so I’ve opened myself back up to looking at it again.”

There was an element of retreat to her time in New Mexico – a “powerful” place where she felt the presence of artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose career was defined by portraying the state’s dramatic landscapes and red cliffs. Now, she says, it’s time to kick back into action. There are some summer tour dates approaching (including Glasgow Summer Sessions) and she’ll be a special guest on US singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile’s The Human Tour this autumn, where she’ll be launching a new single. “I came up with this sequel to ‘Suddenly I See’ for The Devil Wears Prada 2 – it’s called ‘Look at Me Now’. It’s totally indie, grungy rock & roll. It sounds like an Iggy Pop tune. The song didn’t make it in the movie, but I think we’re going to release it anyway, to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of me and the first film.

“I’m also embarking on ‘100 years, 100 women’ – a 10-year project where I’m going to release 10 covers every year of female performers from the 1920s to the 2020s. It’ll just be me and one instrument – there’s no production. It’ll be Big Mama Thornton next to Dionne Warwick next to Lady Gaga, all in the same vibe. I love working on a longer project. I really enjoyed my trilogy, where I took seven years to record three albums and it was just this mind, body and soul extravaganza of writing.”