Katie White and Jules De Martino needed a name for the "unintentional band" they'd created in 2007. For the sheer fun of it, Katie (vocals, guitar and bass drum) and Jules (vocals, drums, electronics) had begun writing songs together and doing impromptu shows as a two piece. Suddenly, they were generating massive excitement at a series of house parties at Manchester's Islington Mill, a derelict cotton mill from the Industrial Revolution converted into a thriving underground artist collective housing painters, filmmakers, writers, sculptures, musicians and more.

At the time, Katie was worki... (+) expand

Katie White and Jules De Martino needed a name for the "unintentional band" they'd created in 2007. For the sheer fun of it, Katie (vocals, guitar and bass drum) and Jules (vocals, drums, electronics) had begun writing songs together and doing impromptu shows as a two piece. Suddenly, they were generating massive excitement at a series of house parties at Manchester's Islington Mill, a derelict cotton mill from the Industrial Revolution converted into a thriving underground artist collective housing painters, filmmakers, writers, sculptures, musicians and more.

At the time, Katie was working in a boutique with a Chinese girl called "Ting Ting," which is also Mandarin term for a "band stand". "I thought it was lovely," Katie remembers. "It can also refer to the sound of innovation or an open mind. Like the 'ting' you hear when you get an idea."

Jules also loved the idea of becoming the Ting Tings. The name had two Tings "and there were two of us." And, like the sonorous peal of a bell, the new moniker held the rhythmic perfection of onomatopoeia.

"We're quite percussive as well," says Jules referring to one of the elements of the electrifying Ting Tings' sound that makes them "The most exciting new band in the country," according to the NME, a highly respected UK music magazine.

But Katie and Jules were not always the Ting Tings. Katie grew up on a livery farm outside Manchester, where, she says, "It's so cold and so boring that there's nothing to do. So all you do is sit and make music. It's just grey skies. I really did just spend my entire childhood bored. I listened to really rubbish music growing up, don't know why. Bad music, bad pop. Whatever crap was on the local radio. I grew up as a teenager in the 1990s so girl bands and boy bands were all the rage. I had a Spice Girls pencil case."

Jules, on the other hand, was born in London and credits his mom and dad for awakening him to the joys of music. "My parents had a great record collection," he remembers. "The classics: Beatles, Elvis, etc. My approach to music was very strange. My mum said that I'd always listen to the B-sides, I was in love with what was going on with the B-sides. Musically, I was into production and the B-sides always had something more experimental, not necessarily driven by the hits. I was attracted to that. The flipside of a single was usually the strongest track."

Jules picked up his first instrument, the drums, at 13 and began performing with his friends. "It wasn't really a band," he recalls, "but when you're that young, you think it's a band. I started to learn guitar, I wanted to be out in front. Eventually I met Katie. I was in London in a band and Katie was in a band passing through the city. We both weren't happy in the bands we were in. I really loved Manchester. There's a lot more bands, a lot more clubs."

Katie, then 19, and Jules kept in touch via the London-Manchester band circuit. Musically in simpatico, Jules relocated to Manchester, where the pair started writing songs together. "Our writing developed," Jules remembers, "and we were trying to make it different. She's a great vocalist. She reminded me of Janis Joplin, Ricky Lee Jones, people like that; she had this slightly folky jazzy lazy vocal and she had this thing. We both got into Portishead and thought it would be great if we could make that kind of music together." Hooking up with a third member, a DJ, Katie and Jules formed their first band, Dear Eskiimo, which lasted "about a year" and signed to a major label before "it all went wrong" (according to Jules) and "went completely wrong" (according to Katie).

The Dear Eskiimo experience led Katie and Jules to the Islington Mill, where they started writing the kind of songs that made them personally happy, and would eventually form the core of the Ting Tings' repertoire. Islington Mill proved an ideal milieu, a thriving creative environment where, according to Katie, "Everybody hangs out and gets inspired by each other."

Liberated from the pressures and strain of an uncomprehending music industry, Katie and Jules began working with a fresh set of sonic ideas and principles. "We didn't know what sound we were looking for," Katie points out. "We didn't even plan on being a band because we'd had such a horrible time in the music industry with the previous group. We didn't think anybody would be interested in what we did, so we wrote songs for ourselves to play to our friends at the Mill. Two years ago, when I came to the Mill, I started to listening to Talking Heads, the Tom Tom Club, LCD Soundsystem, all these really interesting bands I'd never heard of. Talking Heads were the biggest influence. Jules liked more songsmith experimental stuff. I converted Jules to pop music and he's converted me to really like interesting music."

Drawing on the percussive tendencies that come to him naturally, Jules experimented with an interface between his drum kit and a series of effects boxes, among them a pair of Boss RC-50s, customized to provide an improvisational flexibility essential to the Ting Tings' live performances. "We've got two of these machines and a friend of mine, who's really good at electronics, and I took them apart," Jules explains. "We soldered the motherboards to give an interaction between the two machines. I wanted the systems to function in a slightly different way than when you buy them so we hardwired them. The two machines are working simultaneously giving me a lot more memory, a load more loops and more versatility on my pedals."

Jules' unique synthesis of percussion and electronic creates a space for the band to improvise in the present tense, setting up an intuitive chemistry between the pair. "It's not like a backing track," says Katie. "It gives you total live control. It's really quite free how we can perform. We just watch each other and telepathically know where we want to take it so it's different every time we perform. I can tell by his drumming and I think he can tell by my guitar playing."

Jules agrees with Katie's assessment of the Ting Tings' intuitive process. "We can create loads of different layers of music," he says. "We make 'mistakes' all the time, if I hit the wrong pedal, Katie will look at me, change the chords and we go into a jam. We change up our song order quite a lot. There's no right order, no time code, it's all completely live. It's a wonderful way to work."

As Jules was customizing his 21st century signature electronic percussion rig, Katie was performing some musical experiments of her own. "I couldn't play an instrument," she freely admits, "so I picked his guitar up and played a D chord for about four hours just learning rhythm and I put my finger on the wrong string and made this weird chord which eventually turned into Great DJ, our first pop song.

Katie and Jules launched the Ting Tings' discography with a limited edition vinyl single of a song called That's Not My Name with Great DJ appearing on Jules' favorite part of a single, the B-side. After pressing 500 copies of the record, "because that's all we could afford," the initial run of Great DJ sold out completely. The Ting Tings posted a quartet of their songs up on MySpace (www.myspace.com/thetingtings) and, before long, were receiving positive responses from all over the world. MySpace members the Ting Tings have enjoyed more than 1.7 million profile views. For the band's limited edition UK single, Great DJ, a Single of the Week in the NME, The Ting Tings recycled old 7" singles, inverted the covers and re-labeled the sleeves with the band's name and song title using colored duct tape. Previous limited edition Ting Tings single campaigns have included a four city tour (Salford, Berlin, New York and London) where the band invited the audience to decorate 100 blank 7" sleeves at each show. The lot decorated at each show were sold at the following gig.

Word of mouth on the Ting Tings' live shows was ecstatic and attendance increased exponentially with each successive gig. "At the first one," Katie remembers, "there were 25 artists in the Mill and a couple of friends. At the second one, they told a hundred of their friends. The third one was advertised on local radio, which was really weird because it was a house gig. And, on the fourth one, the head of Sony America came and sat on the floor with all the UK music industry people. It happened really quickly and really unexpectedly."

"What's wonderful about the Ting Tings," says Jules, "is every step of ladder that we climb is a new experience. We set up a phone line in the UK and asked people to phone in and leave their name. So we have all this audio, we're going to lay everybody's name over the track 'That's Not My Name' and that will be its B-side. That's how we can continue to interact with the audience. We love playing live and the experience is so rewarding. Doing our own recordings and our own art work and having that interaction wherever we are in the world is something that keeps us human."

Taking a cue from the fashion-oriented Ting Tings (Katie designs and creates her own clothes), both Betsey Johnson and Dolce & Gabbana featured That's Not My Name during their runway shows during New York Fashion Week.

Following a show-stopping performance at the 2007 Glastonbury Festival, the Ting Tings embarked on a UK university tour in October 2007. The group appeared in a series of shows in the coveted opening slot on the 2008 Shockwaves NME Awards Tour.

The Ting Tings were voted #3 on the BBC's 'Top 10 To Watch In 2008', the much-watched list of emerging acts in the annual BBC 6 Music poll, Sound Of 2008, which observed: "The pair have now…become one of the most credible and critically-acclaimed groups on the indie scene."

After signing with Columbia Records, the Ting Tings brought the duo's cutting edge electro-indie-pop sounds to the states with two performances at this year's South By Southwest (SxSW) music festival and a coast-to-coast mini-tour of select US art house and alternative music spaces.

In April 2008, Apple began running an iPod iTunes commercial featuring silhouetted dancers grooving to the Ting Tings track "Shut Up and Let Me Go." The ad may be seen on national television as well as the Apple website.

The Ting Tings recently finished work on their debut album, We Started Nothing, recorded by themselves at Islington Mill in Manchester.

"We didn't expect this to happen," says Katie. "I think that's why it worked. Because we were so carefree we just made the music for us, not for anybody else. We just wrote songs that we loved. It's all going really well and I don't know what it all means. We're just going to go blow the wind. We got this far without pre-planning or sitting down with battle plans." (-) collapse