KT Tunstall

Kate Victoria "KT" Tunstall (born 23 June 1975) is a Scottish singer-songwriter and musician. She first gained attention with a 2004 live solo performance of her song "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" on Later... with Jools Holland and has subsequently also appeared in two episodes of the comedy series This is Jinsy on Sky Atlantic. In 2025 it was estimated that Tunstall's accumulated record sales totalled seven million. Her accolades include a Q Award, European Border Breakers Award, two Ivor Novello Awards, a UK Music Video Award, and two BRIT Awards for Best British Female Artist and Best British Breakthrough. Additionally she has been nominated for a Grammy Award, Mercury Music Prize, World Music Award, and a Hollywood Music in Media Award.

The name of her debut studio album, Eye to the Telescope, was inspired by her childhood experiences at her father's physics laboratory at University of St Andrews. Released in 2004, the album was a strong seller worldwide, selling over five million copies internationally, and ultimately became the 51st best-selling album of the 2000s decade in the United Kingdom. The single, "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree", was given the Q Magazine Award for Best Track in 2005, and "Suddenly I See" won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song in 2006. "Suddenly I See" became a popular hit and was featured in the hit film The Devil Wears Prada (film) and adopted as a campaign song for the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign. Her second album, Drastic Fantastic (2007), features some tracks written prior to the release of Eye to the Telescope and was supported by the singles "Hold On", "Saving My Face", and "If Only". She began the 2010s decade with the release of her third album, Tiger Suit (2010).

In April 2013, she released "Feel It All" as the lead single from her fourth album, Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon (2013). From 2016 until 2022, she released three albums as a trilogy – Kin (2016), Wax (2018), and Nut (2022). Singles released during this period include "Maybe It's a Good Thing" and "It Took Me So Long to Get Here, But Here I Am". In 2023 she partnered with American singer and bassist Suzi Quatro on the collaborative album Face to Face.

Tunstall was born to a half-Chinese, half-Scottish mother, Carol Ann Orr, who was from Hong Kong, and a Northern Irish father, John Corrigan, from Belfast. Her parents met while her mother was working as a dancer in Penthouse bar in Edinburgh, where her father was a barman. She was born at Edinburgh's Western General Hospital and at 18 days old was placed for adoption by her mother with a family in St Andrews, Fife, Scotland. She never met her biological father.

Her adoptive father, David Tunstall, was a physics lecturer at the University of St Andrews, and her adoptive mother, Rosemarie Tunstall, was a primary school teacher. They already had adopted another child who became her older brother Joe and went on to have another son Dan. Tunstall has said: "My earliest memories are Californian", from a sabbatical that her father took at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1979. She was musically oriented and her adoptive parents supported her interest. She recollected that she asked for a piano when she was four.

Tunstall grew up in St Andrews, Fife, attending Lawhead Primary, then Madras College in St. Andrews and the High School of Dundee, but she spent her last year of high school in the United States at the Kent School, a selective boarding school in Kent, Connecticut. She spent time busking on Church Street in Burlington, Vermont, and at a commune in rural Vermont. Tunstall studied at Royal Holloway, University of London. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Drama & Music in 1996. Royal Holloway conferred an honorary doctorate in science on her in 2011 for her work on environmental issues as a musician.

Throughout Tunstall's twenties she played in indie music bands including Elia Drew and Tomoko. She focused on songwriting, as well as performing with members of the fledgling Fence Collective. Tunstall lived with Gordon Anderson of the Beta Band and the Aliens, whom the song "Funnyman" on her second studio album Drastic Fantastic (2007) is about. She toured with the klezmer band Oi Va Voi and stayed with them while they were making their second studio album, Laughter Through Tears (2003).

When British label Relentless Records put forward an independent offer, Tunstall opted to sign with a U.S. major label instead. However, when that deal did not work out, she decided to go with Relentless. Although Relentless co-founder Shabs Jobanputra recognised the potential in the quality of Tunstall's voice and songs in the early 2000s, his assessment then was that she "wasn't ready yet", and so together with Tunstall's manager, Jobanputra discussed "the process of how we saw her happening and how we would work, why we thought the songs were great, why we thought she was great, and why it could really work if we took enough time."