The singer on living with hearing problems and how she'll be taking audiences back to the 90s with a new musical.
The Scottish singer-songwriter and musician KT Tunstall has released eight studio albums, performed at Glastonbury and is best known for her 2006 global hit Suddenly I See.
She's written the soundtrack for the new musical Clueless, which has its West End debut in February 2025. She spoke to Saga Magazine about her life and the new musical.
It’s a few years now since I got tinnitus and went deaf in one ear. I’d been on a long-haul flight and then I went straight to see my friend Mel C play a Spice Girls concert.
I don’t think it was because of the gig, rather the effect of wearing myself out, but I ended up with tinnitus and lost some top-end hearing.
Then I was on tour in 2018 and lost the hearing in my left ear completely.
So, I’m deaf but have ringing in my ear… I know!
I think if it had happened ten years earlier it would have been really devastating, but it’s a mental decision of how you want to handle it.
I thought, ‘You know what, I’ve got my legs, I’ve got my eyes, I can do everything I’ve always done, I can still make records, so I’m lucky.’
The Nina Simone song that goes, ‘Got my liver, Got my blood’, that was the song going round in my head the whole time.
I was adopted along with my older brother. Mum always joked, ‘Everyone else got what they got, but you got chosen’, though the truth is you’re always going to have a bit of an abandonment issue. It didn’t hit me until late in life.
Adoption does cross my mind. It’s an amazing thing to do if you are a secure enough adult to provide an amazing life for a kid. I’m turning 50 soon. Ask me then."
My birthday is in June and it’s going to be such a knees-up. I’m 50 at the same time as my first album, Eye to the Telescope, turns 20.
When I lived in north London, I had birthday parties at the pub and, as my present, all my musician friends would jump up and do a ‘guilty pleasure’ cover and I thought, ‘Why don’t we do that but at the Royal Albert Hall?’ And it came true!
On my actual 50th birthday we’re going to play the album from start to finish, followed by my birthday party with the audience there.
I can’t say I remember the first time I saw the film Clueless – it’s like it was always there. When it came to writing the soundtrack for the new musical, I thought, "I want to achieve a kind of imaginary amazing 90s playlist that would be on a C90 cassette tape".
So every time you hear a number in the show, you’ll be like, "Oh, that sounds like…"
It’s about nostalgia for the 90s – it will automatically remind you of what you were wearing and how you felt back then.
Clueless, The Musical opened at London’s Trafalgar Theatre on 15 February.
Saga has teamed up with London Theatre Direct to offer you tickets at the best prices.
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