| KT
Tunstall revealed |
|
Why is new Brit Award winner KT Tunstall not known by her first name Kate?
According to the songwriter with Chinese blood and a Scottish heart, "KT's
got a bit more attitude than Kate which just says farmer's daughter to me."
KT is the latest in a line of outstanding contemporary Scottish songwriters including
Texas, Fran Healy, Teenage Fanclub and The Beta Band.
She
grew up in the university town of St Andrew's always knowing she had
been adopted at birth. KT spent a lot of her childhood in the countryside
with her outward-bound parents. Music was never really part of the equation
until her older brother discovered the joys of hair metal.
|
KT
took up piano, then flute and gradually her singing voice developed
its earthy individuality listening to an Ella Fitzgerald tape.
By her mid-teens, KT had started writing her own songs. At 16,
she took up the guitar, teaching herself from a busker's book.
She gained a scholarship to Kent School in Connecticutt, New England and
formed her first band, The Happy Campers, and played a host of informal
gigs. A music course at Royal Holloway College in London followed.
KT returned to St Andrews forming a group with Fence's Pip Dylan and honing
her tastes with a diet of James Brown, Lou Reed, Billie Holliday, Johnny
Cash and PJ Harvey.
A few years and bands later KT went to London again and began writing projects
with Swedish songwriter/producer Martin Terefe, London-based Orcadian Jimmy
Hogarth and London's Tommy D. With over a hundred songs in her pocket,
shae set to work on her debut album with her new band and legendary producer
Steve Osborne at the helm.
|
 |
|
Her
debut album 'Eye To The Telescope' is the creative consequence
of an inquiring imagination. She says: "I was really into
sci-fi books as a kid. That's partly why the album is called 'Eye
To The Telescope’. My dad is a physicist and he used to take
my brothers and I into his lab when we were little. He had the
keys to the observatory at St Andrew's University and he'd get
us up in the middle of the night to show us Halley's Comet.”
Winning Best British Female artist at the 2006 Brit Awards has now made KT a
shooting star in her own right!
|
 |
|
