You’d be forgiven for wondering where the Ting Tings have been recently. A couple of years ago it was virtually impossible to walk into H&M or switch on the TV without hearing a snippet of their distinctive jerky dance pop. Whether you liked it or not, infectious singles such as ‘Shut Up And Let Me Go’ and ‘That’s Not My Name’ became fully integrated into the noughties pop vocabulary with remarkable speed as Katie White and Jules De Martino went from struggling musicians to Ivor Novello winning, Glastonbury conquering pop stars apparently overnight.
Of course it wasn’t overnight really, it never is. Both members of the Ting Tings had had their own brushes with the sharp end of the music industry; White in failed girl band TKO and De Martino in a number of rock and dance outfits, as well as a failed venture together, Dear Eskiimo, another pop dance act with DJ Simon Templeton. After Dear Eskiimo flopped, White worked in a clothes shop to pay the bills, whilst the pair gigged by night, part of the buzzing Manchester music scene centred on Islington Mills. The rest, to steal a threadbare cliché, is history. The Ting Tings were eventually snapped up by local then major labels, catchy singles were released, high profile festival slots and awards followed and they toured the world. Now, nearly four years after their mega selling debut We Started Nothing, the Ting Tings are finally releasing a full length follow up, Sounds From Nowheresville, at the end of this month.
Usually record labels keen to capitalise on a successful debut try to rush out a second record before the buzz dies down. In the fast moving music biz, delaying a follow up record can be a real risk, so when I catch up with De Martino in early February, a polite and articulate interviewee despite being fully ensconced in what sounds like a gruelling press junket, I’m keen to find out what took the Ting Tings so long. “I think with the first record being successful we fell in love with touring, not just the shows, which are brilliant, but we actually fell in love with travelling,” De Martino explains. “As Katie says, for a girl from Wigan who flunked out of school… it’s tough and she didn’t study and she didn’t think anything was going to come of her creativity, and as she always says, she’s gone round the world six or seven times and she’s seen countries she would never have been able to see without music and that has a big effect on you. Of course it’s all very well to say a year and a half later ‘come back home, you’ve got to make another record,’ but if you’ve got the chance to go to places like Indonesia, China, all these places that you’re just never going to see… We knew what the option was for us; it was like ‘why would we want to make another record?’”
The experience of touring a successful album has obviously had a profound effect on the band. De Martino talks extensively and with quiet passion about the experience of playing in Jakarta- “we were onstage in front of 7000 people who couldn’t speak any English but knew every word of our songs from the beginning to the end… I guess that says it all really”- and highlights that even when the duo were writing and recording they never really stopped performing live, heading off on a mini tour every few weeks to keep up the momentum. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the eye opening experience of being on the road, the band were reluctant to return to Salford to record the second album. Did they consciously decide to isolate themselves? “Yeah, maybe,” De Martino concedes thoughtfully. “Maybe not consciously, but we wanted to move away from what we were doing in Manchester. Islington Mill is a great place and we still go back there, but it’s a place where our friends, lots of artists, base themselves. The problem is that we’d spent three years there as part of a scene, doing parties getting advice, writing our first album, and when the album took off we just felt really rotten about going back there. It just felt kind of wrong to do that, to relive that same thing. It was such a fantastic experience going from absolutely nothing to seeing the world…” De Martino falters slightly, “do you know what I mean? It would just never be the same and we didn’t want to ruin that memory.”
To avoid ruining that memory De Martino and White chose to record in Berlin and Ibiza, an experience they clearly relished. Life in these famously hedonistic cities sounds blissfully rock and roll, recording sessions punctuated by visits to art galleries, partying with friends and clubbing, but when De Martino gets talking about Sounds From Nowheresville it becomes clear that he regards the creative process with almost po-faced sincerity. “We didn’t want to make a record that was so immediate and so kind of disposable. We wanted to make a record that meant a lot more in terms of content… That’s what was important about the sessions when we were recording it, everything had to be quite organic, if any of us had the intention of writing a hit record, of setting the world alight again, if anyone had that intention we just didn’t go to the studio.”
Once again the experience of touring appears to have been all conquering, having a direct impact on the direction of this second album, a jukebox mishmash of different styles rather than a straightforward dance pop record. “I’ve got a particularly large record collection and there’s no way I can carry that on the road with me for two years, it’s impossible to do.” explains De Martino, “So everything became digital and I am now a fan of the digital age but I was pretty anti when we were first starting out. Now because of that option you’ve got with mp3 players and laptops I tend to make my own albums up, my own playlists, so when we made this record I had this vision of making it more into a playlist than an album.
If you listen to this record there are a lot of influences in there. There’s a song called “Day To Day” that reflects Katie, where she was brought up and the sort of music she was listening to, The Spice Girls and TLC, it was really important to her to have a record that reminded her about why she started in music- those records that she loves, those types of bands, listening to radio and going to school. It was important to us to find songs that were covering our influences.”
Clearly the pressure of following up a ubiquitous mainstream success must be pretty galling, particularly if you have a reputation for being a bit contrary. Aside from resisting their label’s request for a second album, The Ting Tings reportedly deleted their first set of demos for Sounds From Nowheresville apparently spooked by the record companies rock solid conviction they’d written a hit. It’s clear that De Martino is highly uncomfortable with the idea of serving a label, hardly surprising given the way they’ve been stung in the past. “Even though we are signed to a major label we are an independent outfit who make our own records, do all our own videos”, De Martino insists. “We come to the label for help with distribution and obviously creativity on their front with press and stuff like that. But it does stop there with us, it’s really about our desire and if that desire is not strong then we don’t make a record.”
Despite the open reverence for the creative process, it is clear that The Ting Tings feel no need to paint themselves as tortured artistes. “Our lives right now are very happy and we’re very lucky” De Martino says as we wrap up, “but I don’t think it makes much sense unless we make an album we’re truly happy with. And I think we’ve done that.” The sense of self assurance is unmistakable. Like it or not, The Ting Tings are back; you can batten down the hatches all you want but if you ask me, resistance is futile.
The Ting Tings – Sound of Nowheresville is released on 27th February 2012 on Columbia Records.
Rachel Pronger