Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall’s third long-player Tiger Suit might be considered the latest argument for the traditional album format in the download age. A marked departure from her rootsy debut Eye To The Telescope (2004) and its follow up Drastic Fantastic (2007), the new record is structured like a three-act play. Tiger Suit makes its entry with handful of brash, brassy electro-glam tunes, moves through a middle suite of introspective torch songs, and, as the eyeliner begins to run, locates some steelier inner core, reconciling artifice and essence in the penultimate tune ‘The Entertainer’.
“That pretty much sums up what’s happened to me over the past years,” Tunstall says, discharging press duties from a creaky old bench in her back garden. “For me, making the record was like an archeological dig. I had to push myself out of my comfort zone to find out what turns me on now. I went through some fairly major confidence dips in terms of having faith that I was able to deliver what I thought I was capable of, but I felt I tapped into the indigenous part of myself and found something quite primal. I did a lot of travelling at the beginning of the year when I wanted to write, and I just felt feral again, and I loved it!”
Has she read Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes?
“No! I’ve got it, and it’s on my shelf, waiting to be read. It was funny because I did a bit of writing over in LA, and a couple of friends of mine who live in LA are quite into shamanism, they work with spirit guide animals, and this is part of what Tiger Suit is about, the title. We took a couple of trips up the West Coast, we went first to Joshua Tree and then to Big Sur, very spiritual, strongly indigenous places, and we tapped into something on those trips and I came up with some great material while I was out there.”
Tunstall is hardly the first bohemian to reject religious orthodoxy in favour of tribalistic belief systems. The musician, she reckons, has as much of a claim to the shamanistic role as any priest or minster.
“I always love the feeling that you create in a new community when you do a show to 6000 people,” she says. “ You just get this feeling that something is created in this space, your own forum, stuff happens because of it... I think it’s important even on a very personal level to meet a liberator, and I think that person for me was (Fife singer-songwriter) King Creosote, who has now got his Fence Collective. We’re still very close and we did a bit of writing together over the past year. But he was like the guide of this little town where I grew up in. You see someone do something and it opens the door.
“And I’ve had it happen on a much grander scale working on this album with (Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian producer) Jim Abbiss, ‘cos I’ve been so trad in the past: ‘I don’t want to use electronica because I feel like it will date’, y’know, paranoid that your stuff is going to sound shit in ten years time, sticking to the jeans and the white t-shirt of music if you like. And he kind of told me off and said, ‘What’s so bad about sounding dated? If you sound dated it means that you did something that was really significant that will remind you of that time.’ And I listen to records now that sound dated but still sound great.”
Such as?
“The Cocteau Twins and Bow Wow Wow. Heaven Or Las Vegas is dated but it’s still beautiful, moving, emotionally inspiring music. So it freed me up really, I just thought ‘Fuck it, whatever I want to do I’m gonna do.’”
Which included the warmer end of analogue electronica, including Vangelis’s Blade Runner and Chariots Of Fire soundtracks. Tiger Suit, incidentally, was recorded in the legendary Hansa Studios in Berlin, home of Heroes and Lust For Life and Your Funeral My Trial and Achtung Baby.
“I was breathless walking in,” Tunstall admits. “It’s such an amazing studio, even now, when it’s a lot less grand than it was. We recorded ‘The Entertainer’ and ‘Golden Frames’ in that big ballroom, it was really a massive privilege to do that, I felt very honoured to be part of that legacy. We played differently, I’m convinced of it. Iggy, David and the ghosts of Bono’s healthy spine... You’ve gotta fucking step up to be part of that, and it really made us play harder.
“And I fell in love with Berlin. We had an amazing night out clubbing one night, and all of it cemented a slightly more angular, fiercer approach. We needed fangs. Something happens to you when you go on stage, you do become something. It’s not necessarily against who you are, it’s not a complete lie, it’s just like Max in Where the Wild Things Are: he puts his little suit on and he’s a warrior. It’s my Joan of Arc armour.”
Tiger Suit gets a live airing in the New Year when KT Tunstall plays the Radisson, Galway (February 19); Opera House, Cork (20); and Olympia, Dublin (21)