Kt and the Sunshine Sound ; When Kt Tunstallwon Pop's Biggest Prize, She Didn't Party at the Brits She Talked to Louise Gannon About Growing Up Without Music, Her Decade On the Dole and the Shock That Her Real Dad Was a Folk Singer

Mail on Sunday › March 07, 2006

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Summary

Backstage at the Brit Awards, the newly crowned Best British Female Artist has lost her golden trophy. In this, the epicentre of pop's glorification, it's the kind of disaster that would cause a meltdown in other, more precious artists. KT Tunstall is just laughing, though. 'It's around here somewhere,' she says in her distinctive Scottish burr, as she hastily scans the dimly lit backstage bar. 'I'm sure someone will find it I'm still getting used to the fact it belongs to me!' She's so relaxed you could easily be fooled into believing that awards mean little to her; you would be entirely wrong. Her debut album, Eye To The Telescope, with its string of hit singles including Suddenly I See and Other Side Of The World, turned the onetime street busker and 'commune-dweller' into a million-selling artist who already has a strong foothold in the massive American market.

Growing up with adoptive parents, she did not pick up a guitar or even listen to music until she was in her mid-teens. Now, aged 30, Tunstall has gone from being the sort of girl who hangs out at folk festivals, gets all her clothes from charity shops and lives like a Seventies hippy to the one whose diary is systematically planned until 2008, has top designers falling over themselves to dress her and lives mostly in hotels.

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Kt and the Sunshine Sound ; When Kt Tunstallwon Pop's Biggest Prize, She Didn't Party at the Brits She Talked to Louise Gannon About Growing Up Without Music, Her Decade On the Dole and the Shock That Her Real Dad Was a Folk Singer

In short, she is a very lucrative, super-successful one-woman industry. But what makes Tunstall so different is that she still has the soul of a hippy which is why she is not in any way dismissive of the shiny gong the music industry has conferred on her. Far from it. This Brit Award is a real triumph for Tunstall. The 12in gold statuette means everything to her.

Relaxing now in her Brits' backstage trailer, giving Live her time while all around her are streaming off to parties, she says, 'When this happens, you get a lot of people who think you've only just arrived on the music scene.

I've arrived after ten years of doing this. Ten years of just being a musician...

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