Do the right Ting
Heralded as 'The Sound of 2008' by the UK media, The Ting Tings have come from nowhere to become the biggest breakthrough band this year. Katie White, the straight shooting frontwoman of the twosome, tells Bianca O'Neill it's all bullshit, really.
I've heard brusque frontwoman Katie White is a frank and funny interviewee. Faithful to the rumours, White opens with: "I'm a little bit tired, and still a bit hungover from two days ago. I've also had four champagnes..." Charming to the bone, White chats candidly with me like a high school girlfriend talking about what's been happening in her life, and what she really thinks about it all.
"It's nice that people are complimenting us," she says of the media acclaim, "but you know, it's all bullshit. As long as you know that, you can take the compliment, but still know you're not the best band in the world. People have to like your album... We know what we love about our album, or what we love about our live show. We don't need some random person we've never met in the press to tell us that."
It's no surprise that White can dismiss the opinions of others: she was in a girl band in the mid-90s. She laughs and says modestly that although they supported girl/boys bands Steps and Five, it was just a couple of 14 year olds dancing on her mother's kitchen table - and that's exactly what makes me feel like I'm talking to an old girlfriend. She's the same 90s girl we all were, teenage slaves to the marketing machine of the pop Top 40. "The first CD I ever bought, like a single, was that song [starts singing ‘Spaceman' by Babylon Zoo].
Then I realised it was shit, and the best part of the song was high-pitched squeaking," she laughs.
So she's not conforming to the musician cliché that their first album was something uber-cool like The Velvet Underground? "Anyone who says they did are fucking lying! They liked the same bands, but they're just not telling us..."
Clearly, with the Ting Tings, pop is not a dirty word. "We are pop! It's a bit stupid shying away from something that you are. I mean pop just means popular, it means that people can identify with it, I think. I think you can be a pop band and still be creative and musicians. You don't have to be an airhead that's manufactured and has no say over her creativity. There are starting to be more bands doing honest pop, and I think that's a good thing."
‘Honest' is the key word here. On the surface The Ting Tings are a fun band, replete with catchy hooks, quirky beats and fun lyrics. Their debut album We Started Nothing has quickly become a favourite on the party circuit mainly due to left-of-centre, pop-perfect songs like ‘That's Not My Name' and ‘Fruit Machine'.
However, White is quick to tell me that anyone who thinks that about them, is quite frankly wrong.
"People are like, ‘play ‘That's Not My Name'!' but they don't realise that we wrote that song in such depression because we'd been in a band before and we'd been signed, dropped and spat out by the music industry without even getting a record. We wrote these songs when we were really down, thinking that no one would ever want to work with us again. And I think that's a nice way to write songs because you're not writing them for anybody but yourselves... It's great when you don't feel any pressure, because you can just keep on doing what you're doing and love it."
We Started Nothing is out now through SonyBMG.