Evening all. I don't know what it's like in America, England or Denmark (strangely, my three biggest audiences outside of France), but it is pouring it down here, and having just had to go out and walk in it with my iPod on, it's fair to say that Miss Kate Victoria Tunstall isn't my favourite listen right now.
In a strange set of circumstances, this is the first time that I've heard the Scottish singer-songwriter in a number of years, but the last time I heard her, she was on the stage at Radio 1's Big Weekend in Sunderland, and, unsurprisingly for my former North East home, it was absolutely lashing down.
It's rare that you will find me praising Radio 1 often, but their free festival really is magnificent. Even if I did have to sit in the Civic Centre car park all night to get a ticket. To think that bands such as Kasabian, the Foo Fighters, the Chemical Brothers and more came to Sunderland was unbelievable at the time, and would still be now, if the radio station didn't do it all over the country on a yearly basis now.
But, I digress. Back to KT. As I was saying, the last time I saw her, it was raining as heavily as I can remember it raining in England. It's kind of like that outside now, but here, it's the kind of rain that you wouldn't mind going for a walk in, if you were dressed in shorts and t-shirt. It's thick, it's fast, but it's a bit warm, and would have been a lot of fun if I wasn't wearing a jumper that weighed about nine stone when wet through, which it was within 15 seconds.
In Sunderland however, it wasn't much fun to be in. It was cold, and it was on its way to giving me a monster dose of flu. I had, however, just danced to Maximo Park and Interpol with Jo Whiley, which was, well, quite cool when I was 19.
Again, I'm getting sidetracked. KT Tunstall. Yes. My actual only memory of her songs is her getting out sheet music to play and sing a cover of Missy Elliot's Get Your Freak On, and I remember it being genuinely very good. It made me want to hear more of the Edinburgh-born singer.
In the time between that (obviously not so) memorable gig and giving Eye to the Telescope a listen today, I have become aware of a fair few of her songs. I'm pretty sure that track three on here, Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, is on one of the guitar hero games, and Suddenly I See has become instantly recognisable the world over. Both are great tracks, and leave me wondering what would have been if all of her songs were this good. I realise that I'm being greedy, and very few albums are 'all filler, no killer', as Sum41 once claimed to be (they weren't by the way), but the album seems to pad the real class with not-so-impressive filler.
It's not even that i don't like KT's voice, I am genuinely fond of it, it's a nice Scottish, not the take it to extremes twang that Glasvegas offered yesterday. My only surprise really was doing a bit of research and seeing that Ms Tunstall is older than me. I wouldn't have put her down as being 35, I don't know if it's more to do with the voice, or relatively baby-looking face, but part of me wasn't expecting that.
Anyway, I think I've probably wittered on for long enough on this one. I apologise for a lot of it not actually being about the album, but as I've said on earlier posts, I'm not going to sit and give you an appraisal of every song. I may stray more towards that on some entries, but this just isn't one of them.
I'll do you a deal though yeah, as a thanks for reading this, I'll throw up an extra special effort tomorrow (the fact that it is Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip is just a coincidence - honest).
I do hope you'll join me again then.
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