Clueless, Mean Girls, and The Devil Wears Prada have all undergone a musical makeover, injecting the West End with a colourful nostalgia hit that shifts tickets too. KT Tunstall is part of the stage revolution.
Twenty years on from her breakout hit Suddenly I See, KT Tunstall is refreshingly candid about her early career: “I was a totally crap pop star,” she tells Sky News.
The Scottish singer-songwriter may have a Brit and Ivor Novello to her name – won the year after she outsold every other female artist in the UK – but she’s not taking any prisoners.
“You have an idea of what you should be as an artist, I think it’s important to kill that.”
She goes on: “The whole point of being an artist is that you never know what you’re going to be, and you should never assume that you know.
“I think there’s something much more divine in the kind of growth of yourself as an artist that it’s not your place to know what’s going to be.”
Sharing a private thought, she admits: “I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud, but I have always thought to myself, ‘What if the things that you have done are not the things that you’re most known for? That is something coming?”
Turning 50 next year, Tunstall’s embraced change head on, helping transform the 1995 film Clueless for the stage, alongside its creator Amy Heckerling.
Working in Hollywood for four decades and counting, Heckerling, who also directed Fast Times At Ridgemont High and Look Who’s Talking, says, “I always felt like the movie, while we were making it, kind of wanted to sing.”