The Next Big Ting

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Indie duo The Ting Tings have already played on Later… with Jools Holland, and are currently travelling the UK on the NME Awards Tour. Yet as vocalist Katie White explains, this isn’t their first taste of fame…

It’s all go, go, go for The Ting Tings at the moment. Life for the indie pop duo – Katie White (vocals, guitar, bass drum) and Jules De Martino (drums and vocals) – is a blur of gigs, meetings, interviews and travel. But Katie’s very happy indeed.

“The NME tour is brilliant, yeah!” she says when we ask how it’s going. “Quite hectic, because obviously there are four bands trying to sound check at the same time, but the audience was really good.”

She’s clearly enjoying it all – no surprise as she’s been into music since childhood. “I didn’t think I was a particularly good singer, but I’d always liked dancing – even a bit of ballroom,” she admits. “Later somebody asked if I could sing, so I started singing and could just about hold a tune. That’s when I really got into song writing – I got addicted to being creative.”

Not that this is Katie’s first stab at fame; she and two school friends performed as girl band TKO (Total Knock Out), supporting acts including Steps and Five. After TKO broke up she linked up with Jules De Martino as part of short-lived threesome Dear Eskiimo (and yes, that’s how they spelt it). Although creative differences and record label problems split the band, Katie kept writing songs with Jules and the eventual result is The Ting Tings. “We’ve been in the industry a bit now so we know what it’s all about,” Katie explains. “As long as we enjoy performing and are passionate about our songs then we can just get on with it. I also think that because we had it snatched away from us before, we’re a lot more grateful than we were first time we got this opportunity!”

Like a growing number of new bands, The Ting Tings have a lot to thank MySpace for. “We just cut some songs on to our MySpace page, took some photos of us and started having parties in our living room,” she says, remembering their earliest private gigs. “We invited some artists and friends over. By the fourth party a guy from Sony was sitting on the floor. We’d only just decided we would call ourselves The Ting Tings and be a band, and suddenly the music industry was literally sitting on our floor.”

Thanks to this interest, many of The Ting Tings’ first “proper” gigs were in America. “We did some on Sunset Boulevard and met record producer Rick Rubin,” she adds. “Then we flew on to New York – head office for Sony Records – and it went really well. We hadn’t really been anywhere outside the UK before, so were really quite stunned – it felt like we were on holiday. We didn’t realise they were quite important gigs, but they went well because it felt so natural.”

So, assuming someone’s missed the NME tour, the Radio 1 session, that career-founding appearance on Later… with Jools Holland and doesn’t have internet access, how would Katie describe The Ting Tings’ sound? “We’re a pop band,” she says without hesitation, “but we’re different from most pop because we are real pop – we write it and record it all ourselves. We are a homemade, do-it-yourself pop band.

“Because there are just the two of us, Jules plays the drums, I play the guitar and we’re always swapping and changing our instruments,” explains Katie. “We are quite shouty and punchy live, but it depends how the night goes. If the audience is subdued it might turn into a more emotional performance but if they are loud we jump about and have a dance.”

Katie’s main musical influences, growing up, were Take That and the Spice Girls. It’s only more recently that Jules has introduced her to bands like Talking Heads, The Smiths and Blondie. “I couldn’t believe I had missed all these amazing bands,” she admits, and she knows those classic sounds have had an influence on The Ting Tings’ debut album.

So how is 2008 shaping up for them? “We’re playing in the NME tour till the end of February, then we’re going to the US for two weeks,” Katie says. “Then we’re back here for about a month and then we’ll do all the festivals. And then Australia, Japan – just seeing the world and playing gigs.”

It’s a life many End of Term readers would love, so what advice does Katie have for anyone wanting to follow in their footsteps? “Just go with your instinct and do music that you like as opposed to what you think is cool,” she says. “Do something that makes you feel really good, because even if people don’t like it you can still feel passionate about it. Follow it through and keep on persevering.”

Find out more about Katie and Jules at www.thetingtings.com

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