April 20th

Source: Times Online

On the stage of a student-union nightclub It was the voyeurism that got me in the in Exeter, a slight woman wielding a fuzzy-end. I could cope being ‘superpoked’ and headed drum beater is banging seven shades ‘highfi ved’ and ‘movie quiz challenged’ of Day-Glo pop out of a bass drum. One of more times than is seemly. I’d even got into her arms has escaped from her tiny cardigan, and her red pinafore dress-cum-shorts is creased up by her furiously pumping legs. Her fisherman’s cap has already flown off. A guitar is hanging down her back. She is called Katie White, and she looks like a deranged children’s television presenter played by Debbie Harry’s daughter. A name is scrawled on the drum skin: the Ting Tings. A few feet away, her band mate is bouncing behind a drum kit. He wears sunglasses and a Cramps T-shirt. He is Jules De Martino, and he looks like a hit man from Hoxton.

It’s a Thursday night, and most of Exeter’s 16,000 students are away for the Easter holidays. But at only their second-ever headline show, this Manchester boy-girl duo are causing a good-natured riot. You could call the Ting Tings the upside-down White Stripes. Or you could just call them the best new band in Britain, a best new band who have done everything themselves.

It hasn’t been easy. Pre-Ting Tings, they were callow members of the failed post-trip-hop band Dear Eskiimo. Low points included the time their old record company asked White, now 25, how far she would be willing to go, kit-off-style, for men’s mag photo shoots. “It was probably my fault as well,” she says with a snort. “I obviously didn’t throw enough of a strop.” And then there was the day when the bailiffs came hammering on the door of their Manchester home, and a miserable afternoon spent clearing pigeon droppings from Islington Mill, the arts complex where the Ting Tings are now based. “You can’t just throw the poo away,” says White, a farmer’s daughter. “You have to get men in spacesuits to come and incinerate it.”

When, at the beginning of last year, White and De Martino, 34, roused themselves from their postDear Eskiimo slump and formed the Ting Tings, they started with nothing. White learnt to play guitar, and when they had written three songs, they decided, what the hell, let’s have a party. After all, Islington Mill – a converted cotton mill, in Salford, that is a Warhol Factory-style home to a number of artists’ studios – is a great place for an all-back-to-mine knees-up. They invited their artist neighbours and a DJ, got the beers in and performed their slim new repertoire. They called it the Ting Tings Night. “We were a band that weren’t that serious about being a band,” says De Martino. “And then there was a party.”

The night became a monthly event, publicised on MySpace and local radio. The parties got bigger and so did the band’s set. Soon, record labels and publishers were clamouring to get in. The duo eventually signed with Columbia: a big label, but one that promised the pair creative control. They recorded their debut album, We Started Nothing, entirely on their own, using GarageBand and Pro Tools recording software. It cost 0p. Yes, that’s zero pence.

At a climactic party last May, the Ting Tings sold limited-edition 7in copies of their first single, That’s Not My Name (re-released next month), wrapped in individually designed sleeves. The song is White’s two-fingered lyrical response to the cattle-market mind-set of an industry where a pretty girl is just another pop commodity.

“I remember, after all that shit, sitting there thinking, ‘What am I about? What have I got to offer?’ So the song’s a bit of a f*** off, and a fight back. It’s not just going, ‘Poor me, poor me.’ It’s going, ‘I might feel shit, but I’m not having it.’ ” It isn’t just the music they control. The pair scrapped the new promo for That’s Not My Name – even though it was vastly expensive – and replaced it with their own lo-fi clip. At the Exeter gig, I bought a copy of Great DJ in a handmade sleeve. The B-side was something called Etching. When I tried to play it, Etching turned out to be, not a B-side song, but a picture of a drum kit scratched into the vinyl. That’s totally Ting Tings.

“Some performers put on a facade to get on stage,” White says. “We don’t. If it goes down, we go down with it. If it goes off, we go with it.”

“It might be a case of us getting this album out, touring it, ending the band, then starting a new one next year,” says De Martino.

“Yeah,” yelps fizzy new pop icon White. “To feel fresh again!”

The single That’s Not My Name is out May 12; the album We Started Nothing is out May 19. The band are on tour in May

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