KT Tunstall was reading about Adele the other day when she made a surprising discovery. “Adele has had number one albums on other planets, that’s how much of a success she is,” says the Scottish singer. “And she’s sold 3.5 million albums.”

She can’t quite bring herself to say ‘only’ 3.5 million but you get the point. Tunstall’s 2004 debut Eye To The Telescope shifted 4.5 million units whilst enjoying a zillionth of the exposure Adele’s 21 has received. Not that she’s grumbling – she’s never particularly enjoyed being famous in the first place. Her point is that the music industry has changed so much this past half decade that nowadays a record can sell less than four million copies and still move the cultural dial in a profound way.
Tunstall has been ruminating on the subject of LP sales a great deal recently, for the understandable reason that her latest long player, Tiger Suit, was – as she admits – rather a flop. On the heels of two chart-topping albums, the record barely scraped the UK top five (in Ireland it flat-out died, only reaching number 33). This was bittersweet as Tunstall believes it is by some distance the most interesting thing she’s yet done. Musicians are always making such claims for whatever product they’re currently flogging. In her case you sense she genuinely means it.
“That’s the way the industry is,” she shrugs. “People say that if you sell a million records now, it’s the same as doing ten million ten years ago. And anyway, sales have never been a source of joy for me in terms of my music. It’s really who’s turning up at your shows, what people are saying about it. The fans have been great. They’ve come with me to this slightly new place. That’s all I want.”
In 2004, Tunstall was a struggling unknown, recently turned 30 and facing into a lifetime of thankless support slots and toilet circuit gigs. Then she was invited to fill-in for rapper Nas at the last minute of Later... With Jools Holland. Seizing the moment by the lapels, she stormed the show with the loop-driven blues belter ‘Black Horse And The Cherry Tree’ and promptly became the year’s biggest-selling overnight sensation.
She had further mainstream success with 2007’s Drastic Fantastic. But by that time she had started to bridle under the singer-songwriter label and was anxious to reboot her sound.
“I really needed to escape from the shackles of being a commercial artist,” she explains. “You know when you see trees in Japanese gardens and they’re strapped to a frame, so that they will grow in a certain shape? When you have success, that’s how you feel. You end up being pummelled into this thing you don’t want to be, because you’ve done well.”
Her label was willing to put up with her indulging her experimental side on Tiger Suit ( she dubbed her new sound ‘techno nature’). However, they blanched when she proposed slapping an arty portrait of herself transforming into a tiger on the front cover. They won the argument, so instead she commissioned a huge mural of the image to take on the road.
“They got freaked out at the idea of putting a painting on the front of the CD,” she says. “I thought, ‘Alright then, we’ll have a fight about it’. They ended up winning the album cover. So I was like, ‘okay I’m having it for the live show and it’s going to be massive!’”
Rows about album sleeves aside, the promotional campaign for Tiger Suit got off to a wobbly start after Tunstall started taking other musicians to task in interviews. Most infamously she questioned Shakira’s need to writhe about, porn star-style, in the video to the otherwise fantastic ‘She Wolf’. Looking back, does she regret the outbursts?
“It’s a massive shame that people won’t speak their minds anymore,” she says. “It’s like the ‘50s all over again. People just don’t have a fucking opinion anymore. I’ve always thought it was great to read interviews in which people are honest.”
Though she has a hard time thinking of herself as a celebrity, Tunstall has lately experienced the downside of life in the public eye. Adopted as a baby, it recently emerged that her birth mother is married to a British National Party candidate in the UK. Cue a string of ‘KT’s stepdad is a Nazi’ headlines.
“I’ve always found it really weird... that lust for fame,” she muses, answering the question in such a roundabout fashion it probably requires a compass and GPS. “I can’t relate to it in any way. It has never been attractive for me. Being a musician is awesome. Obviously part of that is being known. I’m happy for people to come up and chat in that context. But I’m not interested in discussing private stuff with people I don’t know.”
She thinks she’s drawing all of this scrutiny because she’s otherwise quite boring.
“I’m married – that automatically puts me in a ‘dull’ category for the tabloids. When they get into a position where they can’t get anything on you, they look harder and try to blow something up that isn’t really exciting. You sort of get used to it, though it’s something we could happily live without.”
The clock is ticking, but how could we ever face Hot Press Assistant Editor Stuart Clark again without popping a question about sometime Ash guitarist Charlotte Hatherley, who recently played and toured with Tunstall? How did this mouth-watering alliance come about?
“Obviously I knew Charlotte from Ash. One of the amazing things about her is that she’s a female lead guitarist. Which is so rare. Isn’t that interesting? Girls are ruling the charts and yet there are so few guitarists. Charlotte is queen of that field. She is incredibly versatile, she can play and sing and she looks great. Also, neither of us are really girly girls so we got on fantastically.”
Girly girls or not, with Tunstall having spent most of her career touring with smelly blokes (going so far as to marry her drummer in 2008) it must have been nice to have a member of the sisterhood on board
“Well, that’s the thing – I think guys definitely raise their game hygiene-wise when there are a few women around. The state of some tour buses I’ve seen where it’s blokes only. Trousers everywhere, that kind of thing. You definitely wouldn’t see that when we go on the road.”

KT Tunstall plays Sligo Live on
October 28.