Review: KT Tunstall at Astor Theatre
KT Tunstall at Astor Theatre
w/ Germein Sisters
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
With energy, humour, and delightful storytelling, Scottish artist KT Tunstall began her 2026 Australian tour at the Astor on Tuesday night. Celebrating twenty years since the international release of her breakout album Eye to the Telescope, tonight was a warm and generous appreciation of opportunities grabbed and held onto, shared with a coterie of dedicated and passionate fans.
The evening’s support act was Adelaide’s Germein Sisters—yes, three actual sisters—who provided an eclectic and intriguing acoustic set. At different times in the performance, across both music and lyrics, the band showcased various flavours to their work, with apparent influences ranging from HAIM through Lorde, Missy Higgins and Lisa Loeb.
The sisters advised they had been working on a new album, with attempted completion before this tour, but they had not quite hit the mark. However, they were able to give the audience a taste of what they could look forward to with the new single, It’s A Shame. Even unplugged, the track sounded like a guaranteed rocker, with extended solos across both drum and bass, and one could absolutely look forward to the full electric treatment.
A talented trio with a well-developed setlist, relaxed stage demeanour, and the knowing banter that comes from a close-knit shared upbringing, it will surely not be too long before the Germein Sisters come back across the Nullarbor again.
KT Tunstall came to the stage next, announcing to her audience that they would be participating in an absolutely banging Tuesday night and teased the prospect as to whether the album of the tour, Eye to the Telescope, would be played fully in order or on shuffle.
As the opening bars to Other Side of the World ensued, an appropriate sentiment this far from Tunstall’s homeland, the audience eased into directly-in-order listening party mode and also found their full voice to sing the opening track note and lyric perfect—an experience that obviously meant so much to those in attendance.
Tunstall subsequently mapped out the Fleetwood Mac science of songwriting—to make the tune so catchy on first impression that all listeners were carried away with dance before anyone fully caught the awkwardness or negativity of the lyrics. With this observation, given after a rollicking rendition of Another Place to Fall, Tunstall connected those very same dots to give her own song an appropriate amount of side-eye.
Tunstall apologised to Perth for being such an infrequent visitor; as an artist, this was only her third performance in two decades. She was especially remorseful to the family members at the front of the crowd—her uncle having emigrated to this city as one of the original ten-pound Poms. As she continued to give appreciation for Western Australia, Tunstall asked what the locals here could ever complain about, because even the sushi she had encountered was all too perfect.
Proceeding to False Alarm, Tunstall misplaced her own lyrics during one of the verses before finding them again at the chorus. The artist totally owned this slip-up, advised it wouldn’t be her if she didn’t get at least one thing wrong, and had been told by fans, more often than one would suppose, that these were often their favourite moments in her live performances. As Tunstall further reasoned, this wasn’t to be mean or cruel, but these imperfections were unique, one of a kind, and solely for those lucky enough there in that moment.
The audience and the artist had made it to ‘that song’, the one that usually ended her encores. But wait, Tunstall rhetorically asked herself, ‘Wasn’t there another song missed earlier in the album?’ The ‘other one’, as she called it? But no, there was an explanation—the album listing being used tonight was that of the original first pressing, used for the first ten thousand copies, before the other one in question had even been fully recorded.
Suddenly I See began, and Tunstall invited any audience member who was so inclined to strut, Midtown Manhattan style, referencing the movie that had kept the song front and centre in the public’s consciousness for two decades. The crowd let itself go, in voice as well as dance, leaning into the track at high volume, as Tunstall and band played it far more rock than pop tonight.
A quirk of the recording sessions and release strategy two decades ago meant that Tunstall didn’t consider the title track a sufficiently energetic banger to add to Eye to the Telescope at that time. Fortunately, her record company had let her tinker with it ever since, seeing the eventual light of day on the anniversary edition last October, and it was easy to understand why this self-described ‘weird little tune’ was held back from the debut album.
Delicately placed in tonight’s show where Tunstall would have put it in the album itself, immediately after the big hit, the song was ethereal, vast in scope, and at multiple points even suggested Radiohead at their most imperial, around the albums OK Computer or Kid A.
The second hit from the album, Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, the ‘other one’ referred to earlier, was introduced by Tunstall with a further fabulous tale. She recalled her first performance on Later… with Jools Holland, meeting The Cure’s Robert Smith, one of her idols, and then, as she watched the broadcast later, being delighted to see that one of the camera angles captured her seemingly as a little goth egg in the King of Goth’s hair.
The album’s commemorative playback thus completed, Tunstall departed the stage briefly, then reappeared not so much for an encore, but more for a series of songs that could be considered a second set.
For the first track in this space, Tunstall graciously conceded the stage to her backing guitarist, Melburnian Kathleen Halloran, whose own debut album, Nobody’s Baby, recently made it to number two on the ARIA Australian artist charts. Halloran, agog at both the gesture and honour of playing one of her originals in this setting, brought Wolves Like You to the crowd, a wonderful appetiser for the audience to further explore her indie rock stylings at their leisure.
Tunstall took the reins of the performance again, telling the fans she had offered a song to The Devil Wears Prada 2, after previously providing one of the standout tracks for the original. She had met the relevant parties in Los Angeles to discuss it, but her music had not quite made it through to the screen or soundtrack this time. As Tunstall joked, the sequel seemed far more polished than the original, and Lady Gaga was indeed tough competition.
However, Hollywood’s loss was most definitely Perth’s gain, and Tunstall announced the world premiere of the song she had put forward for the movie, Look at Me Now—in her eyes, the spiritual successor to Suddenly I See. A driving, insistent combination of fifties rock swagger and seventies glam, the lyrics spoke of comfortable self-acceptance, whereas the original, twenty years ago, was related more to the surprise of self-discovery. It will be intriguing to see how it does on the charts, in a music landscape so different to that which Tunstall first inhabited, but one could easily identify the artist’s creative DNA, authenticity, and pride all over the new piece.
Tunstall concluded the evening with 2010’s Push That Knot Away; the idea behind this track was to combine blues and rave culture, the oddest merging of Eddie Cochran and The Chemical Brothers, all in one song. Originally recorded in Berlin—because, of course, where else?—the amalgam here probably shouldn’t have worked as well as it actually did.
Promising to return to Western Australia sooner rather than later next time, especially having fallen hard for Margaret River the previous weekend with her cousins, Tunstall left her audience with the strongest suggestion to run towards the fear, to do the things that scared them, and to fight that knot in the stomach, as that final song had outlined. Across her career, Tunstall had taken her own advice here time and again, with the opportunities taken and doors opened proving in her mind it had been worth it, despite the challenges at those other times it hadn’t worked out.
PAUL MEEK
Photos by Linda Dunjey
