The Ting Tings Interview
Rock City - Feb 12th

Lucy Knighton from NTU’s student magazine, Platform, caught up with The Ting Tings for chat before their Rock City gig on the Shockwaves NME Awards tour.

You’ve got quite a distinctive sound, who would you list as your main influences?

Katie: Well, I didn’t get to hear any good music until about two years ago, and I think Jules played me a lot of the good stuff. Literally, I’d only heard like Take That and The Spice Girls, just all that mainstream stuff. We both really got into Talking Heads, Bjork, LCD Sound System, The Smiths, all the really good bands I should have heard but didn’t. We listened to a lot of Talking Head’s albums when we were making this album.

‘Great DJ’ is getting some really good radio play, how does that feel?

Katie: It’s a bit weird isn’t it? It’s really odd when it comes on Radio 1. The first time we ever got radio play was from John Kennedy for XFM, and it was so euphoric. It was just us two and some friends, and it just came on and we didn’t realise it.

Jules: We’d only passed the CD to some friends and it was on the radio!

Katie: I was literally jumping round this kitchen going ‘Oh my God!’

Jules: We made the album ourselves, the records and all the artwork on the sleeves, too. To think of it going from just a tape recorder to the record in the shop and it being played on radio is fantastic.

You’ve got that coveted first spot on the NME tour, that’s been filled by such big names before, do you find that exciting or a little bit daunting?

Jules: Exciting.

Katie: Yeah, I think we’re a little bit indifferent to it. I don’t think you get anywhere just because of a band that played the same gig. We were thinking ‘I wonder whether it’s just a consolation prize’ because you’re first on but you get all this hype!

Jules: I think the first slot fills up so slowly you only get half the audience there, so we kept thinking ‘Ahh right, it’s a coveted spot because only half the people are there and they tell everyone else ‘You must go and see that band!’

How are you getting on with the other bands on the tour?

Katie: Good.

Jules: Does It Offend You, Yeah? are cool.

Katie: We share a dressing room with them most of the time. They’re really lovely, and they dance to Jules’ when he DJs! The other bands seem really cool, but we don’t see as much of them.

Do you think you’ve learned anything from them?

Katie: Yeah, definitely.

Jules: From The Cribs we have because it’s their third album. It’s weird – well not weird they’re doing this tour – but this is just a walk in the park for them, so we’re getting a lot from that. Knowing that you can actually go further than this tour, as they already have done, is great to see because they deal with it so professionally.

Katie: They’re really accomplished as well. I was listening to their sound check the other day and I was watching his hands because I’m new to playing the guitar. I’m like how does he do that magical-ness!

How did you come up with the name of the band?

Katie: I used to work for a girl called Ting Ting. We didn’t really decide to be a band but everybody said they liked us so we decided to pick a name and Ting Ting was it. Then we Googled it and found out that it meant ‘the sound of innovation on an open mind’, so we just thought screw it let’s call us that!

What can people expect from a Ting Tings performance?

Katie: High energy, I think it’s probably less poppy than people think, I mean we are pop and we love pop songs, but I think we really try to get a bit of an emotion in it.

Jules: We’ve got these loop pedals all round my kit which means we can lay music on loops and do guitar and drums live. Sometimes it goes wrong, because you hit the wrong pedal or I forget to hit it at all, and we just have to jam. It’s kind of like with the guitar and drums we’ve got a White Stripes thing going on. If you take the loops out it’s just guitar and drums; really kind of dirty. With the loops and little sequences we’ve got, like on ‘Great DJ’, it kind of lends itself to pop. When the two meet together live, though, it works.

Any tips on artists we should look out for?

Katie: I quite like a girl called Anni Rossi. She’s from Chicago and plays the Viola and stuff. It’s quite nice.

Jules: Yeah, it’s lovely.

Katie: There’s this French girl who’s a big MySpace phenomenon. She’s called Soko and she’s got a song called ‘I’ll Kill Her’. It’s brilliant.

Jules: Yeah, it’s good.

Katie: I just keep listening to it and listening to it.

The Northwest seems to be a breeding ground for musical talent, is there something in the water up there?!

Katie: Boredom! You had a theory about the spaces, didn’t you?

Jules: Yeah, there are a lot of old mills and warehouses that haven’t yet been knocked down or refurbished into residential. It feels like a lot of these mills on the suburbs and the surrounding areas house all the artists and the musicians because of the cheap rent. If you’re on the outskirts of London, to go from one side to the other takes two hours, in Manchester everything on the outside is 10 minutes to the centre, which is fantastic.

Katie: You’re more likely to be influenced by things as well. I think in London there’s so much choice that you don’t get to see everything. I think in Manchester there’ll only be two theatre things happening that week, or two things coming to you in the city so you tend to find more community.

Jules: If any other bands are working in the area you’re very much aware of it, whereas there can be something going on in West London that you’re oblivious to in East London.

Katie: It’s the crowd as well. If they’ve got a band that’s doing well I think they really support them.

So you get a good cult following from the outset then?

Katie: Yeah, I think we saw ourselves as outsiders from the indie scene of Manchester. We didn’t hang out round Oldham Street; we tended to hang out with more artists and stuff. There just seems to be that support there when people hear that a band is coming out of Manchester. Obviously, if you’re rubbish they’ll boo you off, but y’know!

Jules: Specifically with this band it’s the fusion between the pop in the songs and the heavy kind of thing. I love pop and now Katie is discovering all these bands. We’ve been together not even a year yet and to have an album finished I think that’s what people in and around Manchester really like about the band. Even though we’re from Manchester we’re not like The Smiths and we don’t sound like New Order, yet we have that pop sensibility and I think that’s what people like. And then of course we’ve got this fusion going on so people can’t quite pin us down. They’re like ‘Oh I love this band, but I don’t know what it is!’

Katie: The indie sort of crowd can’t just go ‘oh, they’re a pop band’ and write us off, because we’re not.

Jules: There’s still such a low-tech dirty edge to what we do. I think if we’d actually been produced by third parties they would have polished everything up. There would maybe have been big hits but we’d have lost that raw edge.

Katie: Auto-tuned to death!

How did you manage when producing your own album?

Jules: Because we recorded everything ourselves we just made it up. Most of the album was recorded right next to a building site and everyday there were like pneumatic drills and cranes, especially when Katie was doing her vocals! She likes to do them a certain way, just stand there with it in front of her and press record, but she kept getting interrupted by a drill! We got through a whole album like that, so sometimes on the CD you can hear it.

Katie: I find that when you do vocals and have nobody to ask what it sounds like you have to make the decision for yourself. You tend to get it done quite quickly because you’re not getting sound checked all the way through and probably wasting half an hour. Normally you’ll have some producer going ‘try and act like you’re possessed’. That we don’t do!

Jules: It’s just you getting your performance down, that’s what’s really important. A good producer has to make sure that you’ve got an artist in an environment they’re comfortable with, but then that’s half their job, isn’t it? It’s really hard to meet someone, then get used to the room and the booth you’re in and all that. We cut all that out and literally live and work in the studio at all times. And if Katie wanted to do her vocals she’d say ‘I feel like singing today’, and that’s what we’d do.

Katie: Also we had all of our live stuff set out in the studio, so we’d keep trying it live to make sure it worked. Even if the song was good, if it didn’t feel good live we’d just scrap it because we wanted it to have that power.

Jules: Something we decided at the beginning was that we were going to have that formula. If in two hours of rehearsing and recording we didn’t get a hit from it, no matter how much we loved it, we just scrapped it and we just moved on to another song. The whole ten-track album is literally first song, second song, third song. No songs from like ten years ago; it’s all happened in a year. It’s very fresh.

So if you did a second album is that how you’d want to produce it again?

Jules: Well, we were thinking maybe what we should do is once we’ve finished and toured this album is just start a new band. The second album needs that extra little edge you didn’t have last time, and maybe the edge we’ve got is that we just fell into this. We didn’t intend to start a band so maybe next January we should just pretend to start a band again!