ALREADY it had been "the best week ever at York Barbican" when KT Tunstall had the chance to finish it on an even higher high on Bonfire Night. Sure enough, hers was a cracker of a show last Saturday.

How could this exuberant ball of Scottish energy playing to a full house be the same woman who only two years earlier thought she "had done with music". "As an artist I feel like I died. I stopped. I gave up. I didn't want to do it anymore," she said, as she moved out to Venice Beach, California, and enrolled in a film composers lab.

In the Los Angeles sunshine she made peace with being a pop songwriter, and the white-trousered, silver-topped KT that filled the Barbican with such a positive spirit, so much quirky humour and boundless passion for performance was a revitalised musician finding herself in a very good place indeed at 41.

It is not compulsory to be a good communicator in a show where the songs are the thing, but it sure helps the atmosphere, the mood, the joie de vivre, reminding you that isolation and cyber lives are not what a Saturday is for. Instead, concerts are where we "humans can get together and care about each other," she said at the night's close.

Over two hours, KT, her myriad guitars and her American band revelled in why live music matters maybe more than ever. There was a new album to promote, KIN, with such stand-outs as It Took Me So Long To Get Here, But Here I Am, the duet with her bassist, Two Way, and Run On Home, and the old faves Black Horse And The Cherry Tree and Suddenly I See too, all making you want to say "I'll have what she's having".