KT Tunstall // Interview 2011

It has been said that the reason people like KT Tunstall is that she’s still ordinary, but I would argue that she never has been. No normal person lights an incendiary spark enough to be called onto Jools Holland’s ‘Later…’ show after a brief stint strumming in their offices on the strength of their debut. With the success she has now, it also takes someone left of normal to remain grounded, appear warm and find humour in yet another interview that we’re priveliged to have with her today. Indeed, the bravery and thirst that spills out of her 3^rd album, Tiger Suit should be proof enough – KT Tunstall only deals in extraordinary.

So we’re speaking on Friday 13th -
- Woah, I forgot about that.

Are you superstitious?
Sort of, sometimes, in certain situations. The only thing I ever do is that if I want something to happen, like if I’m walking along the pavement, I’ll say ‘right, if I get past that lamppost before that car comes past, then something will work.’ I think that’s more OCD than superstition though!

Does that make for some erratic walking patterns then?
It does; if you see me walking down the street looking like a freak, you’ll know that I’m just playing a little game with myself. I quite like bucking superstitions though, like I’ll put a pair of shoes on the table in front of someone who’s susperstitious, just to buck the idea. 

You’re a bit of a renegade then.
Yes, I’m a superstition renegade. I’ll be pushing you under ladders when I see you.

So it’s Friday night here, but I’ll resort to my very British line of questioning by asking you what time it is there in the US, and what the weather’s like…
It’s half past 11 in the morning and I have actually woken up in Vegas. It’s beautiful – there’s not a cloud in the sky and I’m sure that it’s scorchio outside; it’s great, we’ve got two days in Vegas and two gigs here.

Will you take in some of the Vegas highlights? Some casinos?
Certainly will. I’ve got my little foldy bike with me and so I’m gonna get that out and do a little foldy bike cycling tour of all the hotels in Vegas, gonna go and have a neb at them, go and see the Bellagio fountains and stuff like that.

But of course you might not be a winner tonight with it being Friday 13th.
I wonder if there’s gonna be a whole different gambling vibe, or if it’ll be completely empty, like no-one’s gambling.

You could end up gambling away everything on a night like this – your husband, all your worldy possessions -
- Everything. My foldy bike will be gone. Everything will be gone. I could do a bit of Blackjack though, Blackjack’s my thing.

So obviously your reason for taking in Vegas at the moment is that you’re touring the US at the moment – how are you received in the States?
It’s always been a total thrill for me, coming over here. The Jools Holland show catapulted me in the UK and a similar thing happened on the today show here where I got asked to go and perform. I went into the guy’s office and usually they programme three weeks in advance or something, so I wasn’t really expecting anything. I just played ‘Black Horse’ on my guitar in his office and he said “What are you doing on Friday?!” I was like, “Nothing”. “Well come and play on the show!” So the same kind of thing happened where it just sort of blew up for a bit, then after that ‘Suddenly I See’ got used in The Devil Wears Prada and ‘Black Horse’ got sung by one of the contestants on American Idol, so it just all went a bit mental. I’ve been very grateful about how it’s happened over here and I’ve always had a very successful touring life over here, although this is the first time I’ve done a tour here that’s completely solo; I’m just on stage on my own and I’ve got a bunch of loop pedals, a piano, a tonne of guitars and it’s just been fantastic. This is our fifth week out here and it’s just been great.

Is there anywhere you go KT, that you’re not so well known and do you enjoy playing those places?
The only places I’ve really taken off in Europe has been France and northern Europe, so Switzerland and Belgium – and Holland’s been great as well, but really your Spain and Italy and Germany never really took off with my stuff, so it’s quite weird going from France where it’s great, to just a few miles over the border where I can’t get arrested! What I’d love to do -  ’cause there are fans in those places but it’s not the same as elsewhere – what’d be great is to go back to those places and do this solo show where it’s very easy for me to go and do it.

With you being so well established and having fans everywhere, do you miss the struggle? I know some artists miss the journey of trying to make it…
…Nope. Hahaha, no I don’t ’cause I feel that even when I was on the dole and trying to get somewhere, I enjoyed the gigs; it was a struggle, but I loved the gigs, I loved playing to whoever was in to listen, so for me I feel the same now as I did then, that when I’ve got a room full of people, I’ve got a job to do, to give them a good night out. I don’t really feel differently about that now. I don’t feel a complacency, if anything I feel like I’ve got more responsibility to be kick-arse at what I’m doing because they’ve paid. It used to be that they’d just come to a pub to see me play and now I’ve got between 300 and 2000 people who’ve paid to see me and for me, that’s as exciting as any struggle I used to have, to make sure I’m delivering. In terms of the journey, I just love living on a bus, you know, and sitting in a splitter van and driving to each gig and setting all your stuff up and not having a crew and doing it on your own is hard work and quite lonely, so I absolutely love the lifestyle now I’ve definitely upped my standards! But you know, if it all went to shit and I had to do it again, I’d absolutely do it again and I wouldn’t have a problem with it at all. This tour out in America though has been absolutely brilliant though; there’s just been five of us on a tour bus, the support acts have been jumping on and jumping off            and it’s just been such a great experience. Having some time to see where I am during the day, getting the bike out and going out and about around cities is total heaven, I love it.

The time you took away between writing your second and third albums shows that getting out and seeing the world obviously has an amazing effect on your creativity -
- Yeah, the touring and the playing of gigs is not work, it’s what I want to do with my days and with my nights, but it’s the promoting something is when it feels like work; when you’re repeating yourself in twenty interviews a day and answer questions that you’ve not even thought of yourself, you can turn into a bit of a babbling wreck. It’s almost like it turns into forced therapy because what I’ve noticed about interviews when you bring an album out is often that you get asked more negative questions than you do positive ones, like ‘what was the hardest thing you had to do?’ or ‘did you have any moment where you lost your confidence?’, all these things like that, so you end up feeling like ‘oh my god, I had such a hard time, it was so painful!!’ when it wasn’t you know, haha. For this tour, because I’ve not really done a solo tour before, I said that I’m gonna back off on that stuff and just keep my fingers crossed that people show up; do a few phoners, do a few radio visits, but just keep it as minimal as possible and really enjoy myself and it’s been absolutely brilliant. In the future though I’ll probably have to do a bit more work, haha! I should probably stop being such a lazy cow and get out and do some work, but you know, it’s been fantastic; getting up on stage every night and having people show up has been brilliant.

I think that Tiger Suit is your most interesting and feverish work to date -
- That’s such a good word; no-one’s used that word for the album yet and that’s a great word…

It just kinda creeps under your skin and makes your blood pump a little more, but I wondered when the moment was that you were ready to write again?
Well I didn’t write for nearly the whole time that I was away, the only song I wrote was ‘Ummannaq Song’, which I wrote on the boat in the Arctic and it was unusual for me because it took me quite a few months to finish it and usually I can finish a song in half an hour, so that was weird. It was a really long process, that song; it was really important for me that that was deliberate and the opening track of the record ’cause that song felt like it mapped the progress of me going from having a massive confidence crash and really not knowing if I was capable of impressing myself to the point that I needed to, and finishing the album – it kinda spanned the whole time. Then I started writing really properly when I got to India and we stopped because Luke and I were on a proper absorbtion trip where we just wanted to do everything and take in everything, so it wasn’t about producing and putting out, because that’s what I’d been doing for so long. When we got to India, we sort of slowed down at the end of that trip; we had a week of just doing nothing and being somewhere beautiful and I’d bought a little guitar in New Zealand when we’d been staying in a camper van, so I started tinkering on that. By the time we reached that stop in India, the songs started coming and they were very folky actually; they started off quite gentle and it wasn’t really ’til I got back to Britain and really got my hands dirty and threw myself into it and focused on writing every day that the fiercer and more up tempo stuff started coming out.

You mentioned the folky stuff just then, and obviously you’ve just brought out your ‘Scarlet Tulip’ EP, which explores the gentler side. You’ve described that as a really important body of work for yourself – is that because you now have the confidence to strip it back again?
I think it’s the fact that’s it’s nearly come full circle; that’s the sort of material that I first started writing when I was young. I started off as a finger picker – I had to teach myself how to strum when I was busking because people couldn’t hear me, haha. Now though, rhythm is such an important part of what I do, but it wasn’t always that way and so to go back to just finger picking folk songs, but with 20 years of experience of writing and 20 years of experience of life since I first started playing guitar, it just feels very intimate and personal. It also feels like a bit of a bookmark in a way. The other really nice thing about this record is that it’s completely independent; the label were really great and supportive and said ‘do your thing, release it, we won’t take anything – just do your own thing, we don’t need to be involved’. That’s an absolute gift from a record label to let you do that, so it essentially feels like an independent release. The record has no barcode, it’s got no logos on it, there’s nothing – it’s just a CD in some artwork and it’s for fans. I mean, I’d love for it to do really well, I’d love for as many people to hear it as possible, but I think that it feels really special that it’s this sort of little floating entity that isn’t owned, really. In the usual way, it’s not owned by a commercial process, so in that way it feels very pure. It’s very self sufficient, I mean, I wrote all of these songs during the writing of Tiger Suit, I recorded them all and we just did it in our own solar powered studio at home in the countryside and my friend in New York did the artwork in a day, and that’s it done. It just feels so simple and I love that.

That’s an amazing amount of freedom…
Absolutely, to the point where it’s almost no holds barred. There was no interference at all, or ‘your track listing should be this’, it was pure, unadulterated bliss, which was just such a pleasure.

We were able to hear a few of those songs at your gig in March, and they worked so well within the context of the rest of the gig – we were able to share your journey and it made the experience really multi-dimensional.
Thankyou… I think what it’s made me realise is that there are a lot of very strong female artists at the moment who are toting all bells and whistles, all guns blazing, a proper visual noise beast! It’s all about how it looks and big productions and there’s a lot of very elaborate set-ups at the moment with the successful female artists around. A lot of the time it’s more about fashion and style than it is about music, which is great, but it’s not me. I think it’s made me realise that what’s making me different at the moment is that one woman on stage intimacy, and so I think it’s important to nurture that side of what I do. I’m not gonna do a show where I put on a massive stage set and do three costume changes… well, never say never, haha, I just can’t see it happening at the moment! I think it’s just about taking care of something that I do that people really like.

You have a Norwich connection now KT with your husband coming from Norwich, and with you coming back to Latitude, can you give us a memory of Norwich you have?
Well it was so brilliant when Luke’s sister Charlotte got married in Norwich. We’d been on tour and come back and Radio Norfolk do a Bride of the Week slot where they’ll congratulate a bride and so as a surprise, Luke set up that the morning of the wedding we’d secretly go to Radio Norfolk and play a song and they’d make Charlotte Bride of the Week! It was wicked; it was a beautiful morning and we just got up, went to the radio station and Luke’s mum and dad had to make sure that Charlotte was listening to the radio, which she was anyway – I think she was secretly hoping that something would happen! It was so funny coming home to her whooping and cheering. She was over the moon, it was great.

Emma Garwood

KT Tunstall plays the Obelisk Arena on the Friday of Latitude Festival, which runs from 14^th – 17^th July. For tickets, go to www.latitudefestival.co.uk. Read the full version of this interview on Outlineonline.co.uk