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It’s every band’s worst nightmare: you finally get the brass ring of a major label deal, only to get unceremoniously dumped a year later without releasing a note. “Nobody wanted to work with us,” Katie White remembers. “When you’ve been in a band that’s been dropped, you’ve not got great prospects.”
That band, Dear Eskiimo, broke up, but White and bandmate Jules De Martino decided to regroup and start work on a new musical project. They retreated to their rehearsal space, an old engine room at a former cotton mill converted into artists’ lofts near their hometown of Manchester, England. Then they began hosting parties to play their new music for friends.
At the first party, “we only had three songs,” De Martino recalls. “And Katie had only [just] started playing the guitar, so we went naively into these parties just banging things and playing loops and stuff like that.”
Much to White and De Martino’s surprise, things snowballed from there. Barely a year later, the Ting Tings were an international sensation and a surprise hit here in the States, where the jangly, danceable “Shut Up and Let Me Go” soundtracked an iPod commercial.
Despite their chaotic schedules, we managed to catch both White and De Martino by phone to discuss their surreal journey from has-beens to buzz band.
You guys seem to be insanely busy these days. Are you tired of doing interviews yet?
Katie White: The ones that aren’t from the U.K. we like, because people ask different questions [than] what we’re used to. Japanese ones, American ones—they’re more exciting for us.
What kinds of questions do you guys get in Japan?
KW: The main one we got…we didn’t realize, but our name means a rude word there. A guy’s…manhood. [Laughs] So, yeah. We’re basically called the Cocks.
That’s kind of awesome. The actual origin of the name is Chinese, right?
KW: Yeah. We’re named after a girl, so God help her if she goes to Japan.
You specifically learned to play the guitar for this band?
KW: Yeah. I first picked it up about January or February last year.
Do you think a lot of the Ting Tings sound is influenced by the fact that…
KW: …that I’m crap on guitar? [Laughs]
I was going to say “still learning your instrument.”
KW: Yeah. Because I was playing basic chords and Jules had to substitute some of it with his drumming, so it became very percussive-sounding. And you can just hear me learning guitar through the entire album. The first song on it is “Great DJ,” which is like two chords. And by “Shut Up and Let Me Go,” you can hear that I’m discovering rhythm. [Laughs]
Which is more fun for you: playing guitar or banging on that giant bass drum you guys have onstage?
KW: Banging the giant bass drum. It’s weird; I didn’t particularly want to be a guitarist, I just wanted to make more noise. And I was frustrated, because I was like, “Well, I can’t just sing to drums.” So I have this guitar attached to me, but I just sort of dance with it a lot as I’m playing it.
Speaking of dance moves, I understand that your first musical project was a girl group called TKO. Did you guys aspire to be the next Spice Girls? What was your sound?
KW: Sort of. We didn’t really have a sound. I think people think we were like a Spice Girls type band, but 99.9 percent of our gigs were in my mom’s kitchen.
Did you have any inkling when you started performing as Ting Tings that you were really on to something?
Jules De Martino: No, not at all. We had no idea. The kind of people we are, we’re just happy to be having a good evening and paying our rent. When we were getting emails from [Columbia Records president] Rick Rubin, we thought it was our friends making jokes. It just felt so surreal. The first night we played [a real gig] in Birmingham, to about 250 people, Katie didn’t even know how to turn her amp on. After the first song, she said to the audience, “Can you hear my guitar?”
In the U.S., you’re probably best known for having a song in an iPod commercial. How did that come about?
JDM: We’d done South by Southwest awhile back and at one of the gigs we played, Katie fainted onstage. In true Manchester style, since it’s cold up there, she had leggings on, two dresses, a hat. And it was so hot in the tent that by the fifth or sixth song, she was like, passing out. We got through that show and chucked loads of water over her and let her cool down. So [later], we were sitting in the truck with the air-con on and she was getting a lot of water and the manager said, “OK, we’re gonna catch the next show.” And she was like, “Well, I can manage to put two songs together.” And so we did two songs, and these people came up after and were like, “We love the band, we love the band” and giving us their cards, and it’s all Apple [people], you know? That’s where they got to know us. So it was kind of lucky, really.
Katie, you’ve become quite well known for your onstage outfits, since you design and make most of them yourself. Is there anywhere fans can go to get the Katie White look?
KW: I’ve been getting asked that: “Are you gonna start your own line of clothes?” I’m like, “I don’t think people will wear a dress made out of doilies.” I’d love to make stuff and sell it, but I can’t see it being like this big empire of clothing. I like sort of odd stuff. I made a paper maché dress, but you could never sell it.
That’s true. I guess producing mass-producing paper maché dresses might be tricky.
KW: When we first started, I made all the band T-shirts. I used to get up at six o’clock in the morning, before we’d set off to a gig. And our friend had this laminator—well, we got obsessed with laminating things. Have you ever done it? It’s so addictive. So we were laminating masking tape, and then I’d stitch the masking tape onto the T-shirt and sell them to fans. But God knows how many washes you get before the whole thing falls apart. [Laughs] I’d end up getting sued if I did my own clothes line.
