KT Tunstall

Kate Victoria Tunstall, better known as KT Tunstall is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist. She broke into the public eye with a live solo performance of her song "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" on Later... with Jools Holland. 

KT Tunstall was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a half-Chinese, half-Scottish mother and an Irish father, and was adopted 18 days later by English parents who lived in St Andrews, Scotland. Her adoptive parents had no interest in music and owned no records—the only tape her father owned was a comedy recording by mathematician and musical satirist Tom Lehrer.

Tunstall grew up in St Andrews, a town in Fife, attending Lawhead Primary, then Dundee High School and Madras College in St. Andrews, but spending her last year of high school in New England at the Kent School, a selective prep school in Kent, Connecticut.

After school, having learned the piano, flute, and guitar, she left her native St Andrews to take up a scholarship at Kent School in Connecticut, New England, where she formed her first band, The Happy Campers.

She spent time busking on Church Street in Burlington, Vermont, and at a commune in rural Vermont.  She has said that: "...My earliest memories are Californian...", attributed to a sabbatical that her father took at UCLA in 1979.

She is influenced by David Bowie, Patti Smith, The Velvet Underground, Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.