KT Tunstall - Early Life

Early Life

Kate has a half-Chinese, half-Scottish mother and an Irish father. She was 18 days old when she was adopted by an English family in St Andrews, Scotland. Kate never got to meet her biological father. Her adoptive father was employed as a physics lecturer at the University of St Andrews, and her adoptive mother was a school teacher. Tunstall's family also includes an older brother named Joe and a younger brother named Daniel. Her 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 Madras College in St. Andrews, and the High School of Dundee but she spent 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. Tunstall studied at Madras College in St Andrews, Kent School in Connecticut, and at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has said: "...My earliest memories are Californian...", attributed to a sabbatical that her father took at UCLA in 1979.