A singer even Canadians will dance to
Tunstall, who grew up as the adopted daughter of academics who never listened to music, completed her high school education in Connecticut because she was bored in St. Andrews. She only realized the grass was greener at home after studying at Royal Holloway College, just outside of London, in the mid-’90s. “I thought I’d find a Shangri-La of musicians,” she sighs, “and I found a banjo player.”
Unimpressed, she returned home and spent a few years roaming the Scottish countryside, singing and playing the washboard with a ragtag band of experimental folk musicians called The Fence Collective. Not wanting to find herself stuck in a resolutely uncommercial pigeonhole, she eventually made her way southwest to Edinburgh; once again, a bigger city proved harder to crack. “I found a plethora of grungy indie boy bands with electric guitars being very loud,” she recalls. “ And I couldn’t get a gig.” The resolute Tunstall founded a series of music nights at a comedy club, where her three-piece rock band, Red Light Stylus, achieved local success before imploding during a series of late-late-night gigs during the city’s Fringe Festival.
“ We just turned completely nocturnal,” she explains, “and our state of mind and health decreased at a rapid rate — it broke us in the end. I ended up feeling we could have been playing [early ’ 80s Eurovision song contest winners] Bucks Fizz covers and been just as popular, so I split it up, which was really horrible; it’s like finishing with two boyfriends on one day. I went to London, took my guitar, slept on a friend’s floor for a month, barged my way into offices and got myself a tiny publishing deal, which led to a manager, led to a lawyer, and led to a bidding war.”
Nonetheless, the call of Scottish eccentricity proved hard to resist. With a radio-friendly album nearing release, Tunstall headed back north and, as she recalls, “royally pissed my record label off by going on tour with my friend’s band as a keyboardist/ flautist/clarinettist/ wah wah-distorted vocals player. We were 14 of us on a bus going around Britain, and I said, ‘ If anything comes up that’s important, call me and I’ll come back to London.’ ” Three nights into the tour, she was struck by what she calls “a random bolt from Heaven” — her management told her she’d been granted a lastminute slot to replace hip-hop star Nas on the popular BBC TV show Later with Jools Holland, and perform her Bo Diddleyesque song Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.
“Had I had more time to think about it,” she says, “I think I probably would have got really nervous, but thankfully, I just went for it and totally nailed the song like I never had before. I’m actually quite good under pressure. I make many more mistakes in a soundcheck than I would at a gig, which is good.”
In an online poll following the show, more than half of respondents called her energetic, bluesy performance the best of the night — over The Cure, The Futureheads, Jackson Browne, Anita Baker and Embrace. The resulting exposure gave her album instant fanfare. While Eye to the Telescope showcases her strong folk-pop songwriting, it can, admittedly, be overly polished. Live, however, she’s an engaging study in contrasts — a feminine singer-songwriter who wears a dress and strums a guitar but belts out her tunes and stomps effects pedals with big boots, looping her own rhythms to function as her own backing band. Performing solo at the Drake, she eventually draws out an industry audience who, at the beginning, seem more like her stereotype of taciturn Scots than eager Canadians. In the end, it’s just another eminently surmountable challenge for the girl who grew up vying for the attention of small crowds.
“ Playing in restaurants for £20 a night,” she says, “I would play games where I’d see someone talking and having their dessert, and I’d look at them and be like, ‘I’m going to make you listen to this song; I’m going to make you look at me.’ I didn’t always win, but it kept me occupied.”