The Ting Tings’ meteoric rise to the top of the British charts actually started much longer ago than many may realize. Many have circled Glastonbury 2007 as the day when the world really took notice of Katie White and Jules De Martino as it was the spark out of which several searing, dance floor ready singles would lead to the band’s first full length, We Started Nothing. But before that performance and the subsequent concert broadcast on BBC, White and Martino already had the battle scars from being knocked down by the music industry. They had had record deals and drops that forced them to pick themselves up, dust off and get at it again. They developed chips on their shoulders which grew into blocks, constant reminders of both the fact that they had what it took to make great music and that surrounding yourself with people trying to change your art is harmful. They started the Ting Tings from the ashes of previous bands with the precursor that they were going to do things their own way, no bullshit from all the yes-men surrounding them. The rise to where they are now happened because they were fed up with people trying to tell them who they were. The chip on their shoulders is evident throughout We Started Nothing, especially on tracks like “That’s Not My Name” (which the band told is about being dumped in their last band) and “Shut Up and Let Me Go.” It’s a remarkable thing the Ting Tings have done. They’ve created an album that is sneering, sarcastic, brazen, and at the same time bright and infectious. Ten summer anthems released with perfect timing. When I spoke to Katie White she told me the success of the Ting Tings is dependent on acknowledging the chips on their shoulders and using it as a fuck you to those who had previously blocked them.

Congratulations on your album topping the charts. How did you guys celebrate?

Katie White: (laughs) Do you want to know? We were in a car ten minutes from Manchester, which is our home town, and we were playing a show that night and we’d been touring for weeks. So all of our clothes were filthy. We actually washed our clothes (laughs), but drank champagne at the same time — that somebody gave us. But yeah, we didn’t have time to take our clothes to the dry or anything cleaner so I ran home, washed all my clothes in an effort to go out on tour the next day. But we got very drunk that night with friends and family after the show.

The album is a very gregarious, honest, a little brazen. Do your songs reflect your personalities away from the stage?

KW: I actually think that, I can only talk for me because Jules is in another room doing another interview, but I actually think that I’m quite reserved, not reserved, but I’m not the center, you know, I walk into a room and I’m not the loudest person in the room. But I think that it’s definitely a stance where we’re at in our heads with the songs and we mean every word of it. It’s not like all that sort of fabricate this frustration or this spirit to say “Fuck you.” It is actually in us. I find it easier on stage to be more expressive.

Do you see a lot of this fabrication in music today?

KW: A little bit, yeah, I mean even from when I was in a band two years ago. I never used to enjoy performing live because I think I always thought I’d have to do a certain thing on stage or try and create a certain mood. What we do in this band, we’re just totally ourselves, but obviously we’ve found a way that I didn’t feel awkward onstage anymore and I felt like I had something to say. It was a lot like chanty shouting and playing the guitar and Jules on his drums. It just felt — that felt — the easiest way. I think bands like Goldfrapp, I imagine she goes into this persona on stage where she’s very, sort of domineering on stage in a way. And I think, I like that aspect of it, I find that hard to do.

I think it was Jules who said you’re favorite song was “That’s Not My Name.” Is that because it’s so sassy?

KW: It’s weird. It just moves me, that song. It shouldn’t move me because it’s like a chanty song, but at the end and I think it’s where Jules’ drums change and something happens it goes from being quite irritating. I understand that the song starts with “That’s Not My Name” kind of harsh and, like you said, quite abrasive and then it goes into something quite softer and then turns into something quite uplifting at the end. I just like how we did that. I don’t know how we did that to the song, it just happened quite naturally and I just like the fact that it turns into something else.

Have you ever been told that you’re very modest?

KW: Yes…yes. (laughs)

You get that a lot?

KW: Well, yeah, a little bit but I think it’s nice to be modest. I don’t know whether it will make us more successful or less successful. I just, somebody’s knocking on my door. Can I answer it?

Sure.

KW: One second…Yeah, sorry. We tend to find that egos are not a very nice thing when you’re offstage. I think it’s just good to save it for on stage. That was Jules by the way. That was Jules knocking on my door.

What did he want?

KW: He just came in to have the realization that my room is slightly bigger than his. (laughs)

And that’s disappointing to him?
KW: Yeah (laughs)

What is the biggest difference in crowds from North America as opposed to crowds in Europe? Do they react or receive your songs any differently?

KW: I’d say so. I mean…they’re quite similar to be honest. It’s weird, I think there’s this whole thing on, I don’t know if it’s through stuff like MySpace that they all know the songs, but they seem to know quite a lot of the songs that aren’t just the singles. The UK is brilliant but you play London and it’s like a bunch of sticks, you know. They’ll just stand there trying to be so cool, and you have to really work them. But they get to see so many bands that they’re quite hardened to it and they just want to watch. A lot of it when you play, especially for us when we play London, it’s always press there, a lot of press there coming to interview you, and that tends to take a little bit of the atmosphere away. Everywhere else in the UK is fine. We actually played Helsinki recently and they were insane. I don’t think they get any bands there at all. They were like flashing their boobs at us and stealing our clothes when we put them on the stage. They whipped themselves in such a frenzy and we were like “OK, we’re a new band. It’s really flattering but bloody hell. You mustn’t get out much.”

Doesn’t that make for a better show?

KW: Yeah, it does. The people at the front always make the shows because it’s so easy to just stand at the back of a show and just nod your head. It’s the people at the front that create that atmosphere that the band then responds from. And I don’t know whether I’d be a natural person at the front screaming in the lyrics, and I really respect the people that do because they make the gig hop.

You’re returning to Glastonbury soon. How did your show there change the band? Or did it?

KW: It didn’t change the band, it just raised a lot of awareness for us, though, quickly which, it is strange because they wouldn’t let us in. It turned up, we got picked for this BBC introducing thing where, it was a brand new thing where they were giving bands that wouldn’t normally get the opportunity to play something like that the chance to play. It was on a quite small stage and when we went to the gate and they wouldn’t let us in. It was like “Oh, you need to go to another gate.” We arrived in 11 o’clock in the morning and by 7 o’clock that night when our stage time was we hadn’t gotten into through the gate to get onstage and we missed our slot. So, eventually they managed to put the stage time up and we ran through and threw our equipment onstage and performed. We had no idea, on the actual stage we had no idea it was being filmed and about two days later our manager said “Turn the T.V. on now, quick.” We turned it on and we were on the BBC. There was just a big reaction to it straight away.

I don’t think you’ll have any problems this year. Do you?

KW: I don’t know. I hope not. I’m just, we didn’t expect this. Like you said the modesty thing, but we really didn’t. We’d been in a band before this and had been signed and dropped. We sort of knew it was all a bullshitty environment to be in. It’s weird because we’ve come at it a lot from, it’s like, we’re a lot more cynical because it is all bullshitty. But we’ve come at it from a nice angle because we know what the whole thing is, we can enjoy it more and you know, enjoy playing great shows and being creative. The rest is not really real.

Is that, the fact that you’ve figured it out, the reason why you think the Ting Tings have been so successful?

KW: I’ve got no idea to be honest. No, we still do all the press interviews and stuff, we just don’t let it stick in your brain. Say we read all our press, which we don’t do, and there’s 20 people telling you that you sound like, I don’t know, Led Zeppelin or something. It must influence how you write your next song. And for us, when we wrote these songs we weren’t trying to sound like anybody or trying to please anybody. It made us feel good, anyway. I think that we try not to be overly influenced by anybody. We had this thing in our last band where we constantly took advice from people, you know, it’d be like somebody going “Oh, change your hi-hat in your record” and “Can we have ten verses of this one song because we like it.” And we’d sort of went round trying to please them all and it always just ended up in disaster. So in this band we sort of made the unconscious decision to just not listen to any advice anybody gave us. If anybody says to us, “Trust me I know what I’m doing,” we’re like “Fuck you, you do not.” Nobody knows what they’re doing, it’s all bullshit. We’re just trying to be creative and hold on to our songs a bit more.

Well don’t worry, I’ll leave out the comparisons.

KW: (laughs) You don’t need to tell us what we need, huh. A snare sound better than the one we’ve got.

Do you ever get nerves before a show, especially Glastonbury or even Jools Holland?

KW: Yeah, really nervous. I mean, on Jools Holland, I know me, I can really see my nerves in it. I like the fact that we get nervous because if we don’t get nervous we tend to do not as an electric gig. We really rely on that energy between us both, and sort of that twitchiness in a way. We tend not to rehearse too much because when we first started the band we had like three songs and we went out on tour and we played these three songs for ten minutes because we were the support band and we had to sort of stretch them. And I’d been playing the guitar for like six weeks. We didn’t have a clue what we were doing we just knew it was making us feel good. And we sort of, knowing our personalities, we never would have actually done that, but when we did it, it was quite like an extreme sport you know like that adrenaline rush because you’re really on that knife edge looking at each other going “Oh my God, there’s like hundreds of people stood here, watching us, expecting something. And we don’t know where we’re going next.” And that was what gave us our little chemistry. So we try not to rehearse things too much or overthink things. We just go out onstage and hope for the best. But we go wrong every night. There’s always something.

Do you ever see yourself getting over that adrenaline rush? Or do you want to?

KW: No, I don’t want to at all. I mean, that would be really boring if you’re just going through the motions every night. You need, some sort of, I don’t think its particularly good for your body in show days, your body must be constantly stressed because you’re busy playing shows every night. Yeah, that’s the best part. Its weird on a day off at like 7 or 8 o’clock at night your body is, you’re thinking “I’ll have some wine.” And you’re like that’s not fixing it. You can look at all these stimulants of going to watch film or you’re going restless because your body’s used to that adrenaline rush every night and you’re not getting it.

What do you guys do when you’re not playing? You mentioned watching films.

KW: Well, when we get to go home we’re at a place called Islington Mill. It’s an old coffee mill in Salford that has like 40 artist work spaces and a club space and they have quite interesting music like, you know, alternative Brighton noise or this band that came over from Japan called Acid Mother’s Temple that are like this weird psychedelic rock band. They have very interesting stuff like amateur plays and they’ve got an art gallery. We just tend to hang out there. We don’t even go into Manchester that much. There’s just always something going on at the mill and all our friends are there, and just see what the all these new artists are up to, really.

Do you do any art yourself?

KW: I tend to make more costumes and stuff like weird costumes you couldn’t really wear. Jules studied fine art so he’s more into painting, but yeah, they’ve got this thing called Islington Mill Art Academy. And basically there’s a guy called Maurice Carlin, he’s a dear friend that, teaches like a foundation course in art. He had the choice to go to university and he’s like “It’s weird that you go in to tour art,” and so he couldn’t understand that process that you don’t get taught this. So he did this thing where anybody can turn up they run their own curriculum of art. They decide what they’re going to study. You don’t come out of it with the qualification, but I don’t think you really need a qualification for art. It’s fairly interesting. I think they’re just into Berlin. If I had any time off I’d go and join that for a few weeks.

I have one question I have to get to. There’s a rumor floating around that Jules was on George Michaels’ songwriting team. I’m going to give you the chance to clear that up right now.

KW: (Laughs) So not true. It’s brilliant, I love the fact that rumor started, but I’ve got no idea where Jules being part of George Michaels songwriting team came from. There’s not, like, I wish he had. There’s not an ounce of truth in it.

The Ting Tings Official Site
FNMTV Premieres June 13th at 8 p.m. eastern time on mtv.com, featuring The Ting Tings and more