Barely a year after their self-financed debut, the Ting Tings are on the verge of topping the charts.
By Alan Morrison

KATIE White knows kung fu. Actually, to tell the truth, The Ting Tings' singer can barely tell Bruce Lee from Hong Kong Phooey but, right after this interview, she'll be absorbing martial arts moves faster than Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. The music video for Shut Up And Let Me Go requires her to be strung from wires, punching and kicking like something out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and rehearsals for the shoot currently fill her diary. These are the things you suddenly find yourself doing when you're one half of 2008's buzz band.

It's odd that Shut Up And Let Me Go should be the song that's in the forefront of her mind. As far as the rest of the UK is concerned, That's Not My Name is The Ting Tings track that really matters this week. Released last Monday, it had already shot to the top of the midweek singles chart by the time I caught up with White; later on today, she and her bandmate Jules De Martino will find out if they've deposed Madonna and held off Coldplay for the fabled number one spot.

"And they're both big, world-beating artists," she points out. "But we're happy for anything - we couldn't pay our rent last year, so it's just nice to be busy and making music."

If that sounds sweet and perhaps a little disingenuous, then don't be fooled by the words on the page - White genuinely means what she says. Despite being touted on any number of "ones to watch" lists, despite having reached out to television audiences after playing live on Later With Jools Holland and Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, and despite Shut Up And Let Me Go being chosen for a high-profile iPod campaign in America, The Ting Tings are clinging on to their independent spirit even though they've been thrown head-first into the music industry's choppy corporate seas. Their unpretentious approach to songwriting is at the heart of everything that they do.

"We both like pop music," White explains. "I don't understand it when bands write songs that aren't catchy and don't have hooks in them because, for us, that's the best bit - you know, when the melody changes and a lyric gets you and makes you connect with it."

That's Not My Name fits this bill. Like Blondie and Talking Heads given a dose of modern indie girl power, the song contains words that brim over with attitude. Nobody in their right mind, after hearing this, will dismiss White with an "alright, darling?" ever again. But there's more to it than one woman's irritation at being judged by her looks; the song is also about the mindset White and De Martino found themselves in after their previous, three-piece band Dear Eskiimo was dropped by record label Mercury.

"When we wrote it, we were so frustrated and unconfident and invisible," White remembers. "It's quite strange to think that something we made for ourselves in Salford - hand on heart, never thinking anyone would ever get to hear it - is connecting with people."

White met De Martino not long after she'd left school in Wigan. As a teenager, she'd been in little-known girl group TKO, who once supported Five and Steps, although they never signed a record deal. He, meanwhile, had a head start, having been in a couple of indie bands - Babakoto and Mojo Pin - in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After the Dear Eskiimo debacle, they laid low at Islington Mill in Salford, a venue that contains around 50 workspaces for artists, plus an art gallery and a club for live bands. In this creative environment, regrouped as The Ting Tings, White and De Martino's musical partnership flourished.

"That's where we wrote and recorded the album ourselves," says White. "All day we were surrounded by artists and photographers and ceramicists and all these really creative people. So I think we came out of more an artists' scene although it wasn't really a scene. We were just hanging out, students and ex-students trying to be creative."

The atmosphere encouraged the band to do their own thing, and so almost exactly a year ago, they first released That's Not My Name, with Great DJ on the B-side, as a self-made single on local label Switchflicker. Fruit Machine, released as a limited edition 7-inch single, soon followed.

"We released our own stuff because nobody wanted to work with us, as we'd been in a band that had been dropped," insists White. "All we could afford were 500 records paid for on credit cards. We couldn't afford to buy lots of fancy CD packaging, so we made it look nice ourselves. Bands tend to be creative people, so it's strange that they would hand their artwork over to a big, corporate, logo-making company, and then it comes back all shiny. That just seems insincere."

Radio play for the singles, a session for the BBC's Steve Lamacq and a well-received slot on the BBC Introducing Stage at the 2007 Glastonbury Festival pulled The Ting Tings into the public eye. A proper record deal was surely just around the corner, but they remained wary of signing away their musical souls.

"We were so cynical about signing to a major label again because of the experience we'd had with Dear Eskiimo," says White. "But we were very lucky to meet a guy called Mike Pickering, who was a famous Hacienda DJ and was also in M People. He's from Manchester and is an A&R guy for Columbia."

He certainly is. Pickering signed James and Happy Mondays to Factory Records; he now does Columbia's A&R, bringing Mark Ronson, The Gossip, Kasabian and Calvin Harris to the label; he also played a cameo of himself in the film 24 Hour Party People.

"Somehow we got ourselves in a position, unknowingly, where we had loads of different labels wanting to work with us," White continues. "We got to know Mike over a few weeks and felt like we could actually put up with speaking to him every day. He'd been in bands and he knew what it was like and he knew we'd been burned before."

The Ting Tings are now at the point where everything is coming together at a spectacular rate of knots. That's Not My Name preceded the release of debut album We Started Nothing by a week. In a few days time, the band begin a nationwide headlining tour that brings them to Glasgow's QMU on Saturday. Given that they're a duo in The White Stripes mould (albeit with the genders reversed), their sound and set-up could be seen by some as restrictive. White doesn't agree.

"Obviously I play electric guitar and Jules plays drums, but I'll also play a big bass drum, a cowbell and percussion, and Jules will also play the guitar while playing the drums with his feet. And we've now brought a keyboard into it, so we're constantly swapping and changing stuff. And we use loop pedals. I'll sing the vocals, and it'll record it as I'm singing it, and then I'll hit my foot pedal and it'll keep it going. You can keep looping it or you can take it in and out - it gives you a lot of freedom to perform live and you can keep building the sound."

This doesn't mean that they're tied to technology, as the loop pedal effect isn't as much of a live crutch as, say, a full backing track. "On just under half the songs, we're only playing guitar and drums anyway," White adds. "Even if we make mistakes, like forgetting to bring the loop pedals in, it just goes down to drums and guitar for however long we want to leave it."

There is a downside to their format, she admits. "If one of us is tired, or not in the mood, we're the worst band in the world. It falls flat on its face. There are only two people to watch, so you can't hide behind a bass player for half a song to get a breather. It's all about the energy that we use to bounce off each other. The good point is that, because we have to put 100% into it, it's electrifying. We've both been in bands before where there have been more members, and it felt quite dead sometimes. It's strange that there are only two of us in The Ting Tings, and it feels more alive."

The live set that they'll take on tour this week consists of the entire album bar one song, while one of the new tunes - We Walk - sees White on keyboards for the first time. The live versions should be well-honed by the time the band hit the summer festivals, including T in the Park. Even in their rougher form, the songs went down a storm at Radio 1's Big Weekend just eight days ago.

"I was absolutely flabbergasted at the reaction," admits White. "We opened the second stage, while Usher was opening the main stage; he's a massive star and we would have been happy just to get a few people in. But our tent was completely full to bursting, and people were chanting the songs back at us."

Maybe she shouldn't have been so surprised, given the hype that's building for her band. Then again, that same hype has been hit or miss for the tidal wave of musicians whose debut albums have been released in the first few months of 2008 - Adele, Duffy, Hadouken!, Vampire Weekend, MGMT, The Courteeners and Does It Offend You Yeah? among them, each one pushed forward as the next big thing. Do The Ting Tings feel the same pressure to perform?

"There are lots of new bands," White concedes, "but we don't feel the pressure because we didn't set out to sell loads of records. It's nice that people are liking our music, but even if two people buy our record, that's more than we've ever done before. I can imagine it's a pressure for bands if they actually believe the hype."

However, this obsession with the new does tend to make it difficult for bands that are no longer quite the flavour-of-the-month they were a couple of years ago. We Are Scientists, Panic At The Disco and The Young Knives now know what it's like to suffer from second album syndrome. White recognises the symptoms but also offers a cure.

"I'm the same. I'll find a band and then, two years later, I'm into the next thing. I think it's when a style comes in and then goes out that a few really good bands get lost with it. If it's a style of music, but there are no songs that you can sing on an acoustic guitar that still sound good, then that can get dated very quickly. But if you've got a song there, something that's good even if you took away the coolness or hip-ness of it, then you've got a bit more of a chance."

So what does this bode for The Ting Tings' future? White ponders for a moment.

"In a couple of years, people will have moved on to the next thing - The Ting Tongs who, I don't know, play drums on their heads - and if that's the case, then that's the case. If every band set out thinking that they were only doing this to sell millions of records, you just wouldn't do it because the chances of actually getting anywhere are so slim. You do it because you enjoy it. We'd still make music even if it didn't happen for us or people got bored."

A glance at today's singles charts proves that it's going to be a while before we're bored with The Ting Tings. In Katie White, Madonna and Chris Martin have just found a serious new rival.