There’s a warmth inside the Metro Theatre tonight. Diehard fans and visibly excited newcomers fill the room long before KT Tunstall even walks onstage. More than twenty years on from the release of Eye To The Telescope., these songs still clearly occupy a meaningful place in people’s lives.
Support tonight comes from Germein, the Adelaide sisters arriving with tightly wound harmonies and an easy stage chemistry that immediately loosens the room up. Georgia, Ella and Clara Germein move between polished pop and folk-inflected moments without forcing either side too hard. There’s an understated confidence to the set that makes sense for a group who’ve spent years touring rooms and arenas alike, including stadium runs with Little Mix.
KT Tunstall walks onstage to an affectionate reception. Backseat Mafia caught Tunstall supporting Train almost exactly a year ago in a stripped-back duo configuration, and there’s something oddly circular about being back in another Sydney venue watching these songs take on a completely different shape tonight. Stranger still, ‘Suddenly I See’, the song forever attached to the opening sequence of The Devil Wears Prada, lands here at the exact cultural moment the film has suddenly drifted back into conversation again thanks to the recent remake. The whole evening carries this faint sense of timelines folding in on themselves, old songs reappearing with new meanings attached.
Tunstall is joined by Jackie Barnes (drums,) Joel Gottschalk (bass) and Kathleen Halloran (guitar,) which means that the songs land with far greater weight and movement, than a year ago, giving Eye To The Telescope the widescreen treatment it deserves.
Tunstall performs with restless energy, what stands out most though is how conversational she remains throughout the night, constantly joking with the crowd and undercutting moments of emotional heaviness before they become too reverent. She jokes that making music videos is fundamentally ridiculous, recalling one shoot where she was apparently asked to select a fictional love interest from a catalogue of impossibly attractive men. Later, she mentions that her mother is travelling with her on this tour and that they’d flown in from Brisbane earlier in the day straight into Sydney’s soaking rain, weather she laughs feels very familiar to somebody from Scotland.
Watching these songs performed twenty years after Eye To The Telescope first appeared also underlines just how unusual Tunstall’s rise was in the mid-2000s. Long before streaming algorithms flattened everything into sameness, she broke through largely on the strength of a live television performance of ‘Black Horse and the Cherry Tree’ on Later… with Jools Holland, building a career around musicianship and sheer stage presence rather than pop spectacle. Since then, the Scottish songwriter has quietly accumulated more than seven million record sales alongside BRIT Awards, Ivor Novellos and a reputation as one of the most consistently engaging live performers of her generation.
Playing Eye To The Telescope in full reveals just how strange and varied the record actually is. The album constantly shifts between intimacy and release, folk storytelling and sharp-edged pop hooks. ‘Other Side Of The World’ still carries that drifting melancholy which made it feel enormous in the era of Grey’s Anatomy, while ‘Universe & U’ settles over the room with almost uncomfortable intimacy.
The loudest response of the night unsurprisingly belongs to ‘Suddenly I See’. Twenty years later, the song still feels inseparable from The Devil Wears Prada, though tonight it lands less as a relic of 2000s pop culture than a reminder of how sharply Tunstall understood melody and momentum at precisely the moment indie-pop was beginning to dominate mainstream radio.
What’s striking is how deeply these songs have embedded themselves into popular culture without ever feeling overexposed. Eye To The Telescope quietly attached itself to entire eras of people’s lives through television, film and endless replay. Twenty years on, with those cultural touchstones now being revived, rebooted and rediscovered by a new generation, the songs somehow continue travelling alongside them.
Images Deb Pelser
The tour continues to Melbourne, Adelaide and New Zealand, tickets HERE.
