“I’m really into amazing facts. There’s a company here, and you can give them the ashes of your pet or grandad and they turn them into a diamond. So you can wear your dead grandad as a ring. Can you imagine?”

Now that KT Tunstall’s career is in full flight, she has the time to ponder such matters. Having toiled as a singer-songwriter for well over 10 years, the industrious Scot finally signed to a major label.
“It was weird, and it was a hard decision,” she admits. “I’d been doing everything for myself and I wanted to do it independently. I figured the stuff I write is very accessible, but at the same time I’ve a real compulsion to get it to as many people as I can, and this was the only way to do it.”
The resulting album is Eye To The Telescope, a fruitful collaboration between Tunstall and New Order producer Steve Osborne, whom she hand-picked from a shortlist of 15 star knob-twiddlers.
“Steve stuck out a mile, more for stuff he hadn’t done as opposed to stuff he had,” she explains. “He never went down the glossy pop road, and he always worked with guys. I really wanted to find someone who would back me into a nice pretty corner.”
Tunstall concedes that, having released her album after the post-Dido influx of female acoustic troubadours, her timing could scarcely have been better.
“I think Norah Jones was a big turning point in the way the industry was approaching what they were signing,” she says. “In a way it’s become an auction. It’s perfect timing for me, I wanted to go out and be a bit sassier and sexier, and not many girls are doing it. With the material I write I can be commercial, but use it in the way I want to.”
With that, a recent turn on BBC’s Later With Jools Holland helped to set her apart from the flotsam of female songwriters.
“It was quite a defining moment,” she recalls. “The highlight after the show was that I got an hour with Robert Smith. I did go home quite hammered that night, but he was a real inspiration to talk to about making albums. Jools was amazing too; he pulled me into the dressing room afterwards and said, ‘Here’s my number, you must call me and come support the band!’”
Having grown up in the university town of St. Andrew’s (“My mum is hilarious, she texts me to say she’s seen Prince William playing hockey. One day she even walked into the path of his car.”), Tunstall cultivated friendships with fellow local musicians Dogs Die In Hot Cars and The Beta Band. While she clearly revels in her Scottish heritage, Tunstall is also fiercely proud of her Cantonese roots.
“I was adopted and I always knew that my maternal grandmother was from Hong Kong,” she says. “People always say, ‘ah, that’s what it is’ when they meet me. When you’re a kid, when you don’t know who you came out of, you know there are a million other lives you could have lived. It makes you have a very freaky imagination.”
No doubt having a physicist father who has a key to St. Andrew’s Observatory only helped develop this vivid imagination.
“Yeah, he used to play games with us using liquid nitrogen,” she laughs. “Which I’m only now beginning to worry about!”

KT Tunstall plugs her Eyes To The Telescope album on March 5 in Dublin’s Sugar Club.