When you’re writing all the stuff in a band you find yourself striving to make the other people feel that it is

“When you’re writing all the stuff in a band, you find yourself striving to make the other people feel that it is theirs as well,” she explains. “I guess I never properly explored what I wanted to do because I always felt that I had to pander to other people’s opinions. I think I have a habit of doing that.”It was a series of gigs at the Edinburgh Festival playing to “pissed-up punters who would have been just as happy with a Bucks Fizz cover band” which finally did for the whole band thing. London’s gravitational pull became overwhelming, and Tunstall packed her bags and headed south. Within six months she had got a publishing deal – “12 grand for everything I’d ever written and was ever going to write. Great!” Soon the word got around at the record companies and the inevitable bidding war began Columbia even flew her to New York twice for meetings.

“All my friends were saying, ‘Milk it, drink everything in the mini-bar and get them to take you out to nice restaurants,’ but it just wasn’t for me. When that deal fell apart, I can’t say I was all that disappointed. All things considered, I’m happy with the way things worked out.”But there was another reason, after so much procrastinating, that Tunstall took the direction that she did. “What really pushed me to come down to London and try and get a deal and do it on a bigger scale was really accepting the kind of music that I write,” she reflects. “I know it sounds weird, but the kind of music I write isn’t the kind of music that I listen to, which is quite underground, left-of-centre stuff like PJ Harvey and Tom Waits.

Once I’d got to grips with that, I could kind of get on with things.”Certainly, Tunstall’s album reveals a songwriter not only with a rich melodic gift but one remarkably in tune with current commercial pop sensibilities. Still, it’s quite something for an artist to admit that the music that she writes isn’t what she’d buy. When I suggest it’s also a mark of a woman who doesn’t take herself too seriously, she remarks: “Well if I did I’d probably kill myself. But you know I’d really put it down to having had quite a sheltered childhood, where I haven’t been privy to anything particularly subversive.

I’ve been in this lovely bubble all my life.”Tunstall was adopted as a baby, though she knows her biological family is part-Irish, part-Scottish and part-Cantonese. “I knew my real name and who and where my real parents lived. As I was growing up, that really fuelled my imagination, and I would make up these wild stories about where I came from. I think it also gave me license, in a way, to follow my own path. I could say to myself, ‘Well, maybe I’ve got musical blood and this is my destiny.’ “She began listening to music and writing her own songs around the age of 14 – to her eternal shame, the first album she bought was Never Ending Story by Limahl.

At the same time, she began writing songs – “awful, schmaltzy, revolting songs about puppy-love”. It remains a source of bewilderment that her parents had just one record when she was growing up. It was by the Sixties maths professor turned folk singer Tom Lehrer, who ended up writing the music on Sesame Street “He’s a legend,” Tunstall enthuses. “I’d advise anyone to check him out.”At 17, she won a scholarship to an American college in Connecticut “I had been really disenchanted with school,” she explains.