Strangely enough for a musician of her magnitude, KT Tunstall did not grow up in a musical household. Her parents' only tape was a Tom Lehrer album on tape, leading Tunstall to discover the world of music entirely on her own while she spent her late teens travelling the world. Once she hit her twenties she had learnt enough about performing to start playing in a number of indie bands, where she developed a particular interest in songwriting. By her mid-20's she had struck out on her own as a singer/songwriter and after a brief dalliance with an American major label, she signed with the British indie label Relentless Records. #
Wisely, she and the label decided to spend a few years working on her material and her live performances before she debuted, and in 2004, her debut album “Eye To The Telescope” was released. The album received warm reviews from the start, but it was in danger of slipping under the radar until Tunstall was tapped to be a last minute replacement performer on a Later... With Jools Holland episode after Nas (of all people) cancelled. The solo performance of “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” that she played with only a guitar, a tambourine and a loop pedal utterly upstaged everyone else on the show, which included The Cure, Embrace and The Futureheads.
Relentless re-released the album soon after the episode aired, and the album rocketed into the charts at number three, the single also became one of the biggest radio hits of the year in the U.K, and on its release in the United States, became a top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. She also had huge hits in the form of the singles “Other Side Of The World” and “Suddenly I See”, both of which actually bettered the chart performance of “Black Horse...”, charting at number 13 and number 12 respectively. That kind of success has stayed with Tunstall ever since, with her debut certified five times Platinum and three of her other studio albums certified Gold. More so than any sales certificate, however, she is an artist well on her way to national treasure status, and for that, KT Tunstall comes highly recommended.
When KT Tunstall made the TV appearance that ultimately proved to be her big break - on Jools Holland (where else) back in 2003 - she had to be there at twenty-four hours notice, and the timing was so tight that she was practically thrown in front of the cameras with no soundcheck. What followed was an endearingly unusual acoustic performance, as she played breakthrough hit ‘Black Horse and the Cherry Tree’ with the help of a loop pedal; the rest, as they say, is history, with her debut LP Eye to the Telescope going five times platinum. In the decade since, she’s reinvented herself several times, most recently with last year’s critically-acclaimed Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon, and her live show has moved with the times, too; she flits between guitar and piano, with a handful of acoustic tracks making the cut alongside full band presentations. She throws a few covers in, too, from genuine classics - ‘Seven Nation Army’ and Don Henley’s ‘The Boys of Summer’ - to the more surprising, with ‘Default’ by Atoms for Peace making some recent appearances. As unlikely as it looks that she’ll ever quite reach the commercial heights of ten years ago, she’s carved out a dedicated fanbase - she’s not likely to disappear any time soon, either.
Joeg_67
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