The Singer: KT Tunstall and Cora Bissett on the personal stories behind their new musical
As KT Tunstall and Cora Bissett launch a new Fringe show, we bring them together for an exclusive joint interview with David Pollock
In a Sliding Doors world where different decisions were made, Cora Bissett and KT Tunstall could have had each other’s career. Actor and theatre-maker Bissett, of course, started out in mid-1990s bands Darlingheart and Swelling Meg, who were briefly the toast of the Scottish indie scene and looked set to go further.
“Well, I was dumped very early on in music industry land,” says Bissett, almost bashfully, when I mention this during our Zoom call.
“Listen, I've never opened for Radiohead, you have,” points out Tunstall (Darlingheart did indeed support Radiohead, a tale Bissett told in her 2018 Edinburgh Fringe play What Girls are Made Of). “Goals! But I did a short film where I played the part of a singer-songwriter who didn't make it and it's a close path, I'm very aware of how lucky I am that this worked. I'm still amazed, to be honest.”
Tunstall didn’t know about Bissett’s experience in music when they began working together. “I think your experience of that and your deep understanding of it is so great when you're writing Andy,” she tells Bissett today, Andy being a character in the show we’re here to talk about.
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The Singer is a new Fringe production at the Traverse which Bissett has co-written and is directing, with songs by Tunstall. It stars Jamie Rea as Joe, a deaf artist who ‘sings’ with his hands, and Dylan Wood as Andy, a busker who sees Joe’s unique talent as his shot at fame. Bissett first encountered co-writer Rea at a Royal Conservatoire of Scotland showcase event, as part of the first cohort of BA Performance in British Sign Language graduates in 2018.
“He performed BSL to a song,” says Bissett. “There was a guy singing and playing guitar, but Jamie was very much the main event, and the way he interpreted the music through his whole body blew me away. It wasn't dance, it was a song being sung through his hands, that's the only way I can describe it.”
Inadvertently, The Singer is a show with a strong Fife influence. Tunstall grew up in St Andrews, Bissett in Glenrothes; just to shoehorn some extra Fife in, I tell her she was a couple of years above me at school in Kirkcaldy. Andrew Panton, the artistic director of one The Singer’s producing partners, Dundee Rep Theatre, grew up in Burntisland.
“Me and Andrew were at youth theatre together in Lochgelly, I fancied him when I was about 12,” laughs Bissett. “I was like, ‘who's the guy with the jazz shoes?’”
“Meanwhile, I'm Anne Frank at the Byre Theatre,” says Tunstall. This is where the other sliding door comes in. “I started Stage One at the Byre when I was eight, with Alan and Carole Tricker, who were amazing. I thought I was going to go into acting, until I realised I didn't want anyone telling me what to do. I did go to Scottish Youth Theatre in Glasgow, when I was 15, though, so my first summer away. Julie (Wilson Nimmo) from Balamory was in that class, we're still buds.”
Rea, however, is from Northern Ireland. The Singer is based upon his and Bissett’s 20-minute 2023 short film of the same name, which she thought had legs for a longer piece, as she mentioned to Panton. “He was like, ‘yes, I'm in, let's make it happen and let's dream about asking KT Tunstall’,” says Bissett. “Then we got her!”
“I was a busker in Glasgow,” says Tunstall. “My younger brother Daniel was born profoundly deaf, I lost my left ear’s hearing in 2018 and we're using looping in the show. It has a ridiculous amount of convergences of my life, so it feels personal.”
Making a production which is designed for Daniel as much as a hearing person was a big factor in Tunstall accepting the job: “It’s a beautiful achievement on my personal scorecard. I've witnessed from the cradle what it's like for a deaf person in the world. I had to translate for him all the time because people wouldn't care that he hadn't heard what was being said, it’s your mission as a big sister to make sure a baby brother is included in everything.”
At the time the siblings would lip-read; no-one used BSL in St Andrews, so Daniel had no reason to learn until he went to college in Liverpool. Now both Bissett and Tunstall are clear they want this to be more integral than BSL simply accompanying the performance. “My big aim was to not make a play in English which has bits of BSL in,” says Bissett. “Both languages are given equal stage time here, which feels like something I've not seen before in music theatre.”
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“Hozier meets Massive Attack,” was Tunstall’s intended sonic aesthetic. “When the characters do a gig at the Barras, it was really important it was a realistic gig that would blow people away. We can't just pretend that people in this play are oohing and ahhing, we had to do it for real.”
Tunstall’s involvement on The Singer is a new spin on an old experience. Around 2012 she was accepted onto the Sundance Film Composers Lab at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. “It was one of the most extraordinary things I've ever done, but I found out I'm not that brilliant at writing film scores,” she says. “My natural propensity is to write engaging melody, which is actually counterintuitive for film, it takes away from what you're watching.”
Since then, musical theatre has been her extracurricular calling, first with a limited run of a musical version of the Craig Ferguson-written film Saving Grace (“it’s very challenging, writing for lots of different characters and storytelling in such a granular way”), then with the hit Clueless the Musical, writing music for Glenn Slater’s lyrics (“that was really good fun”).
“When The Singer came in I was like, ‘oh my god, I get to just write songs!’” says Tunstall. “I usually write with hindsight to tell the story of something that's already happened, it's really difficult in musicals to write authentically as if someone's realising something on the spot. Here we reverse engineer the songs so the audience watches the characters writing them from scratch.”
Tunstall lives in America, and although she’s been in the room to meet all involved, most of her writing has been done remotely. She and Bissett, clearly very at ease with each other as two women of the same age from the same place, joke about her writing Andy’s song which nearly brought him fame. “Cora’s message was like, ‘there's just a wee problem – it’s not bad enough’,” laughs Tunstall, with mock conceit. “I was like, ‘oh my god, I just can't write a shit song!’
“I feel lyrics are maybe not at the forefront of creativity as they were 20, 30, 40 years ago,” she continues. “I hear less songs in the ether where I think, ‘oh man, that's really speaking to my heart’, and that's why I love writing for theatre. No-one wants to hear anything there unless it's moving you, unless it's emotional, and I love that Jamie's character is the one bringing that to the table here.”
The Singer, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, various times, 4-30 August.
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