All About Manchester

The real ting

Their infectious pop has been lauded as the defining sound of 2008 and their international success has put Manchester on the map once again. As The Ting Tings prepare to release their new single, drummer Jules de Martino opens up to All About Manchester about the perks and pitfalls of the band's newly-found fame.

"Hello?" Jules de Martino's voice comes through loud and clear, albeit a bit tired. It is 1pm in Manchester but he and bandmate Katie White, vocalist and guitarist, are somewhere in Europe, preparing for their next gig.

"We're in Holland today," he says, without a hint of certainty in his voice. He pauses for a moment as if to find his bearings and then continues. "Yesterday we were in Belgium, I think, and we're doing about five other places in Europe this week before we come back to Manchester on Monday."

Of course no one can blame de Martino for being a bit disorientated. The Ting Tings have been on the road pretty much non-stop since their single, That's Not My Name, and debut album, We Started Nothing, both reached No 1 in the UK charts in May. They started with a US tour, then headed straight to Japan before flying back into Manchester for just 12 hours and boarding a bus to Europe. "When you're flying you know where you are because obviously it takes a bit of planning to get to your flight. But when you're on a bus it's really weird. You sleep, you wake up, you get off at the next stop for a gig and then you're back on the bus again."

For a band that has been propelled to international stardom just over a year since its inception, The Ting Tings seem to be having no problem keeping their feet on the ground. They don't travel with a stylist, a make-up artist or a masseuse. They pick their own clothes and do their own laundry. "Katie and I are very much hands-on. We tried to work with a stylist once but Katie is so obsessed about what she wants to wear and how she wants to wear it that it never really worked. So it's just us and the crew, a group of seven or eight of us, on the bus. A nice little family."

Doing it their way is important to de Martino and White, whose previous foray into the music industry left them with a bad taste in their mouths. Before The Ting Tings, they were both in the band Dear Eskiimo, who were signed to Mercury Records before they were dropped for 'creative differences'. Apparently, White's refusal to show the required amount of flesh to secure men's magazine covers did not help the relationship.

De Martino's voice fills with indignation as he recalls those not-so-happy days. "Katie and I both sat in a meeting and told that label where to go, and of course they dropped us. It was painful. We lost friends we thought we had. After what happened we were the band with the least prospects in the world. Nobody wanted to work with us. People around us judged and said we'd made a mistake treating our label like that, but we felt strongly about the decision that we made and we were proud of not letting go of our integrity."

By this time de Martino and White shared a flat in Salford's Islington Mill, which is home to many local artists. Here they mostly drank and wrote music to vent their frustration. "We were working in bars and we didn't think we wanted to be signed or make records again. Getting drunk was our way of getting through this period. Then, when our rent ran out, we thought 'OK, if we want to have a space to create music then we need to find more money to finance it'. So we started to throw house parties just to make a little bit of money selling beer.

"There was no decision making, no big plan or purpose. We didn't put any pressure on ourselves. If you told me then that what we were doing would actually transpire into a band I'd say you were crazy."

It didn't take long for de Martino and White's clandestine house parties to become the hottest club nights in town. "After the fourth house party there were a lot of people coming to them, like music industry A&R and the press. So we called ourselves The Ting Tings, because everyone was already talking about us as a band.

"Our manager from the year before came to one of our house parties and just flipped. He said 'this is amazing, you guys should go on tour'. We didn't think we were anywhere near ready, we only had two or three songs, but he immediately put us on a short tour of the UK, supporting an American band.

"The first night we played in Birmingham and we came off stage soaking wet and raring to go back on again. It just felt so good. It felt like we hadn't finished. I think that was when we first believed that we were a band again; that we had something to say."

The Ting Tings had arrived and their trademark catchy pop tunes struck a chord with record buyers in the UK and beyond. In May, they made headlines when they knocked Madonna off the top spot in the charts with That's Not My Name, and the media attention has been relentless ever since. But the enormity of their success does not seem to have sunk in yet.

"We're not sitting here thinking 'God, we're big.' Being on the road, we're not totally aware of the kind of airplay we're getting out there. Every country we go to is a new audience, and we're just trying to fit everything in at the moment rather than analysing it. But maybe we should; maybe we should be more aware of how lucky we are."

Luck, talent, good looks - they have all played a role in the duo's success and The Ting Tings are now living la vida loca, with all its ups and downs. Yes, apparently there are downs. "These days it's difficult to focus on one thing, like designing the sleeve for our new single for example, when we have our tour manager knocking on the door at 1am saying 'come out, we've got to get on the bus and go'. Before, when we did an artwork we could just focus on that stage and enjoy it; not having this freedom is really frustrating. That's a pitfall of having to travel so much.

"But the upside to that is that we've landed into some amazing cities and we've had fantastic cultural experiences, and I think this will have a massive effect when we go into the studio to record the second album."

There are some memories from their extensive tour that will stay with the band longer than others, and de Martino is happy to recount some of those moments. "I remember travelling to Toronto through a storm to do a gig out there. The plane was just nose-diving and we thought we were going to die. I'd never experienced that before.

"In Chicago we played in a park in front of 20,000 people against the backdrop of the Chicago city skyline. I can't get that picture out of my head.

"Another amazing experience was playing in Rome with Annie Lennox and The Gossip. It was such a stunning place to be, and there we were in the middle with Annie Lennox and The Gossip! We'd never played with that calibre of musicians before.

"In Belgium, I was walking across some fields and Ian Brown, whom I had never met in my life, just turned up and started talking to me like I was his brother."

He goes on, his voice growing increasingly awed, like a young boy who has just had his first bite of chocolate. As if it has not occurred to him yet that they are the ones to know now; that they are the new big thing.

"We had records done in the past but this has been quite fast. We're touring around the world and meeting people at such a fast rate you can't remember most of their names. We've been meeting painters, DJs, singers, dancers, lingerie designers, you name it. We met Har Mar Superstar and Drew Barrymore when they came to our gigs."

With their new, star-studded life, you would think that The Ting Tings may find it difficult to reacclimatise when they return home to Salford. But de Martino insists that they will never be too big for this little corner of the world. "We love Salford and it's important to us where we come from. We love all the artists based around us in Islington Mill - the artists who are struggling. We feel very much at home there."

In fact, de Martino and White are so proud of their Salford home that they plan to carry it around with them on their UK headline tour this autumn. "We want to recreate our house parties in each venue we play at. So we are going to photograph our space at Islington Mill and project those images across the stage."

The Ting Tings' frenetic world shows no signs of slowing down. They have more tours coming up in Australia, Europe, the USA, New Zealand and Malaysia before the end of this year, and they are hoping to go back into their makeshift studio to work on their second album next year. Meanwhile, their new single, Be the One, is due out on Oct 13.

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