The Ting Tings asked me to bring three 7”s to our interview; I brought Petula Clark’s Downtown, Madonna’s Crazy For You and Thin Lizzy’s Parisienne Walkways. “We’re going to turn them inside out and use them for our own release,” explains drummer Jules; “It was all an experiment. We thought it would be interesting to have a Ting Tings record on the outside and a Rolling Stones one on the inside.”

This particular idiosyncrasy is just one example of the band’s approach to making music. They see the process as highly organic, design their album artwork themselves, and even hand-make their own records. “Columbia kept pushing us to release Great DJ, and told us they were going to release as many as possible in order to make a hit out of it. But we said we didn’t want to do things like that, so we limited the number of records to two thousand, because that’s how many we could physically make. I guess people are sceptical about our approach.”

At this point, singer Katie joins us, wearing super skinny black jeans and a hoodie pulled over a wide-brimmed hat, hair poker straight and blonde, and face made-up. Her immaculate appearance doesn’t seem to fit with her ballsy rock-chick credentials.
The duo are tipped to be the sound of 2008: their debut album is complete and awaiting release. Katie begins to explain how the band’s name was decided upon. “I used to work with a Chinese girl called Ting Ting, and I just loved the sound of it. In Mandarin it means ‘bandstand’.” “But it also means the sound of innovation,” Jules pipes up, intellectually.
Their MySpace page defines their sound as ‘Melodramatic Popular Song’, an emerging new genre that begs for clarification. “I liked the ring of the words,” Katie explains, mouthing the phrase to herself. “But we’re quite dramatic ourselves, so I suppose it sums us up quite well.”

When I asked them to define their sound themselves, they were evasive, claiming they didn’t like the idea of compartmentalising themselves. “It’s an easy way of marketing bands, isn’t it,” Jules contemplates, “If you say ‘they sound like the Cribs’ or Craig David or someone. We don’t like being compared, but sometimes you’ve got to accept that’s the only way of reaching out to people.”

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