KT TUNSTALL: MY BOHEMIAN LIFESTYLE

As the poet once said: everybody hates a tourist, especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh. And it's very hard to warm to Kt Tunstall's jolly tales of her time as a "struggling folk musician" when you place the tumbledown cottage and surviving on stolen vegetables in the context of the rich family who continued to support her and the quick turnaround into the D&G Brits millionaire. In effect, she went for a backpacking holiday with the poor folk, bringing back some stories and photos:

"I went out with Ian for a couple of years and we lived up a hill, stealing vegetables from local fields with not a penny to our name," recalled 30-year-old KT. "It was so romantic to have no money, wear - second-hand clothes and go round busking. It was my first experience of people who were living life as musicians. I loved buying clothes from charity shops - and living on virtually nothing. But that is the lifestyle of a folk musician."

Touching, eh? Except, as her boyfriend Pip Dylan from the time points out, she didn't quite have the life of Peggy Seeger. For example, her mother would call round and suggest they dye the dog so it would be the same colour all over. (We'd suggest there's a sitcom dying to be made out of this, but we think it might already have been done.)

And it looks like even when she was living her carefree, abandoned lifestyle, she had her eye firmly on making sure any future carefully cultivated "I'm just me" image wouldn't be contaminated with things she couldn't control:

Pip said that he doesn't haven't any photographs of their time together - "she took them all when we broke up." He added: "She always wanted to be famous and she has always made sure there was no dirt on her. She covered herself from the word go so there's no gossip on her."

Apart, of course, from the vegetable theft.

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