KT Tunstall, Shepherd's Bush Empire

First up, a confession. I’m one of those who’ve never considered KT Tunstall to be quite the real deal. She’s sometimes described as indie, but I’ve always found her more background music for filling out a tax form to than someone to help you through a lost weekend. On a recent single she sings about being “still a weirdo”, but it comes over to me about as convincingly as Guy Ritchie’s accent. Weirdo? That cutesy Sino-Scottish face and Jimmy Krankie accent are only a curio when stacked up against mainstream AOR, which is clearly what she doesn’t want to be. To me she’s indie-lite. Or Melua-heavy. Am I alone? Last night I sure was.

The crowd at Shepherd’s Bush may have looked as if they’d come up with the idea of gigging after ruling out everything else in Time Out but, once on board, had clearly become fully committed to the idea. Largely genteel thirty and fortysomethings, I suspect they’d been alarmed by the Rastafarian ticket touts outside, but once inside they were in for a good time. And to give her her dues, she may be no Laura Marling, nor poet of the sad or angry, but Tunstall is a pretty mean entertainer.

She is like a precocious child full of winning mannerisms, a desire to show what she can do, and to be loved in return. The evening, however, got off to a slow start with the crowd as static as the Eighties-styled bass and guitar players. During “Glamour Puss” and “Uummannaq Song”, you could sense various thoughts going on in the heads of both the band and the audience: they just didn’t seem to be the same ones. “Come on, Get in”, a trademark Tunstall stomp-by-numbers, raised the temperature a few degrees. However it was with “False Alarm” that things really began to get going. Tunstall displayed a level of artistry rarely found in the hits, and it really was almost like one of those sweeping Seventies ballads sung by a dreamy-eyed Californian blonde.

“(Still a) Weirdo” was introduced with the question, “How many weirdos do we have here?” I doubt many, but maybe a few had once owned a mug with the slogan, “You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps”. However ersatz the song's sentiment, it was undeniably pretty in a Dido kind of way. Here Tunstall used the band well. More often the concert felt like a girl with a guitar plus friends. “Hold On” had that quality. And why not? Tunstall really had charisma, and rhythm - in the way she played her guitar, in the way she squirmed and wriggled around the stage, and in the way she sang.

This “almost one girl and guitar” feel was finally fully realised in the solo set, which actually started off as one girl and a whole pile of loops and effects and the huge hit “Other Side of the World”. I don’t know whether it was the lager beginning to take effect, or just the concert running its course but the crowd went nuts. But not as nuts as they went for the next song, the mega hit “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree”. The famous Jools Holland performance (see video below) was reprised with Tunstall taking on the mantle of a modern-day one-man-band complete with foot tambourine. And two thirds of the way into the song, piece by piece, the band was brought back complete with trumpets on loops. Dare I say it, it was all starting to rock.

Watch KT Tunstall performing "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" on Jools Holland:

That level of excitement was only reached again, for me anyway, with the musically inventive “Madame Trudeaux”, which I also consider the highlight of the new album. The other songs such as “Lost”, “Golden Framed”, “Difficulty” or “The Entertainer” all just seemed to come and go. The fans felt otherwise. There were cries of “We love you, KT”; one girl had come with a tiger hat that she gave Tunstall to wear. In fact some of the male adulation seemed to border on the unhealthy, such as the man in the anorak in front of me frantically entering the set list into his iPhone.

“Fade like a Shadow”, ending the set, was met with a standing ovation. The encores brought the appealing “Heal Over”, an amusing cover of Erasure’s “A Little Respect”, and Tunstall showed how totally she felt she owned the Empire for the night by being completely unflapped when her guitar broke in the inevitable closer, “Suddenly I See”.

Was I won over by KT? Not really, but I probably liked more of her songs than I realised. And moreover, listening to them stripped of their studio sheen certainly made me see what a talented and feisty performer she is. That’s not to suggest she should ditch the gloss. Rather it just gets confusing when she tries to be alternative. For the most part what she gave last night was a superior pop/AOR concert. And what’s wrong with that?

• KT Tunstall on tour until 1 March, 2011
• Find KT Tunstall on Amazon