Live at the Belly Up: KT Tunstall (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After slogging our way through an hour oir so of Tolkieniana, Charles and I watched a fascinating Live at the Belly Up episode featuring a musciah named KT Tunstall. I had vaguely heard of her before and had more or less assumed she was a country singer (I think I had her confused with K. T. Oslin). In fact she turned out to be a Scottish-born rock singer originally named Kate Valerie Tunstall (“KT” seems to be merely a contraction of “Kate” or “Katie”). She was born June 23, 1975 in Edinburgh to a half-Chinese, half-Scottish mother and an Irish father. Her music has an appealingly in-your-face quality – in her interstitial interview segments she mentioned Chrissie Hynde as an influence, along with Bo Diddley, David Bowie (to whom she wrote a memorial song) and Kim Wilde, and she mentioned having been on tour with the Pretenders and Simple Minds as their opening act. Her interviews have the same in-your-face quality as her music, particularly when she mentioned having got bored with showing up at open-mic nights at coffeehouses and bars and being written off as just another girl with an acoustic guitar. She said that scene bored her, but playing and recording with other musicians also bored her. Tunstall discovered her salvation in tape loops, through which she was able to get a big sound even with just two people – herself and Cat Myers on drums, percussion and cajon (a wooden box you bang with your hands as you sit on it; I’d seen these before, including by some people I’ve seen live, but didn’t know what they were called until my husband Charles looked it up oniine with his phone during the show). In her interviews she mentioned her problems recording with other musicians and dealing with record producers, one of whom realized that Tunstall herself was setting the rhythm with her right hand on her guitar and so her drummers should follow her and play along with her instead of trying to set the tempo themselves. (Judging from what we heard last night, Cat Myers definitely seems to have mastered that aspect of Tunstall’s music.)

Though Tunstall used an acoustic guitar (albeit one with a pickup inside so it can be plugged into an amp and made louder) on seven of her 11 songs, she managed to create a powerful electrifying rock sound no matter what sirt of guitar she used. The titles of the songs she played nast night – “Feels Like a Shadow,” “Other Side of the World,” “Dark Side of Me,” “Hold On” (in which during the middle she made a daring interpolation of “Walk Like an Egyptian” by The Bangles), “The Mountain,” “The River,” “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” (not at all the idyllic, bucolic song you’d probably expect from that title), “Backlasn and Vinegar” (which she introduced as a song of feminist empowerment), “The Night That Bowie Died,” “Push the Knot,” and “Suddenly I See” (the one tune of the evening that most blatantly copied the Bio Diddley beat; it’s worth noting that Diddley, too, made his first record, “Bo Diddley,” with just one other person, percussionist Jerome Green) – give an idea of the in-your-face quality of her music. Tunstall herself has long, dark hair and wore an odd combination of a white tank-top T-shirt (which had writing on it, though some of the letters looked backwards and I suspect she was wearing it inside out) and a pair of silver lamé pants; Cat Myers was blonde, had very short hair and virtually no breasts, and though Tunstall’s Wikipedia page says that she’s married to her previous (male) drummer, she and Myers sure look like a Lesbian couple. In one of her interview segments, she discussed recording “The River” with an otherwise all-male band and having a hard time trying to get the guitarists to play as loud as she wanted. Perhaps thinking of what other women artists they’d worked with had wanted, they kept playing softly behind her and Tunstall couldn’t get them to play louder. Finally, she sent the tape to a producer she knew in Los Angeles and asked him to remix it to make the guitars louder – and that was the version she released.