the ting tings

Photo by Karen McBride

Biography (according to their official website)

The Ting Tings are Jules de Martino and Katie White. They met when she was just out of being a Wigan school-girl and bonded over a shared ambition to rock the foundations of pop music.

Brought up on an exclusive musical diet of radio pop music ("any old crap really") on a farm in the delightfully named Slag Lane ("try living with that in the school playground"), Katie is quite the most unusual front woman you might expect to crossover as the figurehead of Manchester's Bohemian margins. She speaks as she finds, admits to being fired up by "a massive chip on me shoulder" and hadn't heard of The Smiths until she moved into The Mill. She also possesses the unique ability to whip the stage up in a manner entirely befitting of a frenzied thrift shop messiah. You wouldn't know it now, but she started her musical life in a girl band, which was, as she freely admits, "the sort of thing you did in the mid 90s, wasn't it?" If she wasn't in The Ting Tings you could quite imagine Katie turning heads whilst fagging it outside Night and Day on Oldham Street or picketing to keep Afflecks Palace open. She's bluff Northern alternate-girl incarnate. Funny, brassy, not a boring bone in her body and with one ear always cocked to the chorus.

Jules is the ying to Katie's yang. East London born and bred, with a surfeit of early art school experience, his Metropolitan charms are a direct counterbalance to Katie's brusque Northern manner. He can appear a little more pragmatic than his frontwoman but for the moment that you hear him pounding the drums as her musical foil. Ting Tings are very much a two-way operation. They share lyric and music writing duties. "If it feels right," he says, "then it goes in, whoever has come up with it." Jules admits that it was Katie who taught him to accept the pure thrill of pop music. "Even though we come from opposite ends of the musical spectrum, we have sort of reversed roles. I was always ‘the alternative one', now it's the other way round."
 

See a review of The Ting Tings on our archive HERE

www.myspace.com/thetingtings

www.thetingtings.com