Scenestar

BY CHERYL CHENG

Even if you don’t know The Ting Tings by name, you’ve probably already heard their music. The Salford, U.K. duo, Jules de Martino and Katie White, recently had their song “Shut Up and Let Me Go” featured on an iPod commercial, which helped to break The Ting Tings into the Billboard 100 (they charted at 93). And in their native U.K., single “That’s Not My Name” has reached No. 1. This is all pretty impressive for a band that formed in 2006. “It’s been an absolute rollercoaster ride for us,” admits drummer-guitarist-vocalist Jules, who spent some time talking to The Scenestar on the eve of the duo’s sold-out Troubadour show on June 13.

SS: Congratulations on all of The Ting Tings’ amazing success. How is the tour going so far?
JDM: It’s really going well. People are now singing the songs because they’re getting into the records, and we’re on air, and obviously we’re getting more established. We’ve not had that before. Five, six hundred people just singing along. It’s crazy. It’s an amazing feeling. And also just turning up at shows and seeing the big queues of people who aren’t going to get in, because some of the venues are only like 500, and there are 1,000 people queuing up. And it makes you think, ‘What are these people doing? They’re not going to get in.’ And it’s such a shame ’cause we want to play to them all. We want everybody to have that experience.

SS: Definitely. I had a few friends who went to the last Ting Tings show here in L.A., and they were raving about it. And this upcoming show at the Troubadour has been sold out for weeks. Why did the band decide to return to the West Coast so soon after? Is it tied to the U.S. album release [We Started Nothing is released stateside on June 3]?
JDM: We love the States. It’s something that artists feel real good about when they visit new countries, because when you’re in your own country, you express yourself as you do, as you are. And then you go abroad, and you got new food, and you’re tired and jetlagged. There’s kind of a new thing about it. You’re in a new country with different languages and driving on different sides of the road and stuff like that. And coming to the States, because it’s such a big country, it gives artists such a great opportunity to reach out and see new places and play to new people. And when we were out there, we got accepted so well. It was such a great feeling for people to come out for our music. We just couldn’t wait to come back. And coming back, we want to get our music out to more people and discover new experiences.

SS: This tour is the most extensive The Ting Tings has been on. Do you enjoy touring?
JDM: It’s very tiring. Being a new band and things taking off so quick, you’re trying so hard to contain the excitement of all these different countries that want you to play there, and you want to play in all these countries. It’s hard to maintain that structure and keep healthy and travel comfortably, and inevitably those things get squashed, because we want to play all the cities, and we want to feel that experience. There’s nothing better than to come to the States and play out all these gigs. It’s the most amazing feeling. And also to have our records and our artwork out there. In the U.K., we can do a two-week tour and cover the whole of the U.K. In the States, you’re talking probably six, seven months, if not more. So unfortunately, you have to go on a lot of flights and sleeping time is less. And it’s a bit stressful. But it also adds to something. When you’re a band on the road, there’s something about traveling by bus, long journeys, traveling by flight, and then rushing to the venue, picking up a guitar and just performing your art. There’s something about that that can sometimes inspire you to change things or to try something slightly different on the set or to experiment a little bit more. The challenge is quite rewarding to artists.

SS: What sorts of things do you experiment with and change while on tour?
JDM: Changing the structure of the songs or making mistakes. We use loop pedals, drums and guitars; the way we play live is quite unorthodox. Some of the things we like doing is taking out the loop pedals and just playing guitar and drums, or Katie taking off her guitar and just using loop pedals and drums, and Katie jumps out and has a great time with the audience. The alternative is we also like to experiment with our art. Some of the ideas we got coming out to the States this time, we’re bringing some vinyl albums, the sleeves, making them blank and putting them on the floor of the stage and performing on them and creating a mess and seeing what kind of pattern we make on the sleeves. Then taking those out, putting the vinyl back in them and selling them at a reduced rate to the audience, so they’re getting a cheap album and they’re also taking away an experience from the night. Or alternatively, layering them when people walk into the venues, having them tiled on the floor, just the sleeves, and having people walk all over them, and maybe they don’t even know they’re walking all over them. And once [the sleeves are] in, we can sell them at the end for a reduced price to get people taking away with them an experience.

SS: It sounds like a cool art experiment.
JDM: We used to put our own records out in the U.K. like that. One of the things we did in Berlin, we took our vinyl with us and we walked around the streets, collecting all the leaves on the floor and all the bits and pieces that were in bars and put them in the sleeves. It’s very important with art, especially with the Internet age, digital and CDs, they don’t mean anything anymore. You can download a track, load it on your iPod and then that’s it. It’s over. You drive along to it, it’s a wonderful song, but there’s a lot more to art and music than just having it sitting in your room playing on your hi-fi. If we can give that experience to the audience, wherever we are around the world, or selfishly, we can take that experience home with us, then it means a lot more.

SS: I like that the band cares so much about making the concert experience unique and memorable. It’s an innovative approach.
JDM: The music scene, the record companies have got to catch up. We’re very fortunate to be working with a record company that’s been listening to the needs of The Ting Tings. And they’ve been really trying to help us with our artwork. I think it’s a phenomenon that Columbia Records, both in the U.K. and the States, are having members of their staff making records for us with their hands. It’s unprecedented. It’s the way that music’s going, and it has to go that way. We’re very strong about participating with your art, your music and your audience.

SS: Speaking of labels, you and Katie were both in Dear Eskiimo before The Ting Tings and had a negative experience with a major label [Mercury Records]. Why did you two decide to sign to another major versus self-release?
JDM: [Mercury] wasn’t really that conscious about our music and what we were trying to achieve musically. They were more into trying to sell us as icons and stuff like that. And it was a shame. Albeit, this band that Katie and I went on to form after is much stronger in songwriting, because of what we did before and what we learned. I mean, these things, sometimes we go through them for a reason. We learn things one day, and then we master them the next. Sometimes we go backwards and forwards. We’re not suggesting we became masters of anything here. There’s no wisdom. I think the thing about what happened before is that when we started The Ting Tings, we care very much about our art and our music, but what we didn’t care about was whether we were going to sell any records or whether we were going to make a band that was going to last more than three weeks. It kind of started out of frustration. We had such a bad time that at last we wanted to have a good time.

SS: So why did The Ting Tings decide to sign with Columbia in light of that past?
JDM: Well, we put three records out ourselves. And those records did really well. Obviously, we didn’t have the money to press up lots of records. We did have enough money to press up 500 vinyl each time. Then MySpace started to grow nicely. And, of course, every label under the sun wanted to sign the band again, and we were very nervous about that. The benefits of signing to a label is that your rent gets paid and you’re allowed to have money to get to go on tour. The downside is that [labels] take away all the identity of it and it all starts to become about selling records and not the art. It took a good year as a band to even start to trust people, because we were so untrusting. People were just doing it for the wrong reasons. We found these people [at Columbia] who were in it for the right reasons. They wanted to support what we were trying to do rather than just cash in on it. Columbia gave us a contract where we had total creative control over our music, our artwork. They can’t change mixes, they can’t put things out without our approval. Everything has to come through me and Katie first. Once we got this contract under our faces, people were saying, ‘You’d be crazy not to sign it because basically all it is is funding.’ And they have been an amazing label to work with. They have been so supportive. They’ve been really careful with how they’ve been releasing our records. This is something that record companies around the world desperately need to think about doing, being involved with their artists and getting their hands dirty.

SS: After being involved with other bands, what’s the dynamic of a duo versus a multi-member group?
JDM: Every band works differently. What we found is that the two of us have very much got a direction that’s similar. We like art. We live and work in a place that’s full of artists, and it has a big influence on us. We like pop music, we like energy. We like happy music that’s very positive, that drives people to feel good about themselves. Even though there are some messages in our music that are quite dark, there’s some optimism in there as well. And when you’re in a bigger band, sometimes that gets diluted, because obviously you’ve got more opinions in a band. Sometimes that works wonderfully well, sometimes it’s about the mixture and the characters in the band. With the two of us, we really rarely disagree. It’s quite a phenomenon. We don’t have a situation where we’re discussing what the next thing should be. It’s more like we have ideas, we get together, we write those ideas and we give them very little time in the studio. It’s much more about the live experience. And when we do go in the studio, we give them maximum two hours. And within two hours, when we start recording that idea, it can give us a fix. And we’re the judge of that. When you’re recording it, if you don’t get that fix in two hours, we scrap it. We don’t store it. We don’t think about coming back the next day. We don’t think, ‘Well the verse is really good but the chorus is shit so let’s come back tomorrow and try it.’ We just erase it off the drive. There’s no way to come back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. And it’s that experience in The Ting Tings, that pair of us, we really feel strongly about.

SS: What’s in store for the future of The Ting Tings after this tour? Are you thinking about the next album?
JDM: We’re very impatient. We don’t believe that in bands you should dwell on the future. Any band that you and I have listened to, if it’s overworked, if it’s thought about before then, it’s never going to happen. I think you have to be writing, you have to be arguing, you have to be in that environment. It has to happen there and then. And of course, by the time you finish the album, by the time you’re on the road, it’s been a year’s work, give or take. We in The Ting Tings, we walked in, frustrated, we started the whole thing together, and we started to develop what we were doing collectively, and there was no direction. It was just frustration. And I think that’s what we’d like to do in the future. I don’t think we want to think about the second album, how we’re going to do that, what we’re going to do. We want to go into a studio and just go, ‘What are we feeling?’ And that’s how we wrote this album. And I think we’ll write the second album the same. And if we don’t, we’ll start a new band.