Noticed a lack of catchiness the pop-sphere of late? No Great DJ's or That's Not My Name's? That's because the masters of infectious tunes, Manchester two-piece The Ting Tings, have been holed up in Berlin writing and recording their second album - the follow-up to their multi award-winning indie-pop triumph, We Started Nothing. We caught up with feisty front-girl Katie White and head boy Jules De Martino to get the lowdown on the new record, the truth about those Jay-Z rumours, and just why they're calling it 'art'.
You're almost at the end of your festival circuit for the summer, what were your best bits?
Katie: Istanbul was great. We'd never been there before, and it's a really cool city. It's great to go there and see that people know your music, when we've not even been there.
Jules: Paris! Paris is always fantastic for us.
Katie: The boys; they crowd surf onto the stage and kiss you on both cheeks and get off! And it's so good, you're like 'Oh!' Only in Paris do they crowd surf and not throw beer at you or pretend to do a mock hump of your leg.
Katie, you said in an interview that you hate watching videos of yourself perform because you find it embarrassing. Have you had any mortifying on-stage moments over the summer that you wish you could press delete on?
Katie: I danced my pants off, literally, so that they were round my knees at Great Escape in Brighton. And I threw them to him [points at a roadie]. I had to wiggle out of them kick them away from me.
You've just finished recording a new album. What name are you going with for it? Are you sticking with Kunst [which is German for 'art'] or has that been vetoed?
Katie: We didn't really go with Kunst. We said that we liked the word and that we were using it as our little personal working title, and the person we did the interview with just wrote it and said 'The Ting Tings have named their album!' and we hadn't. And then everybody started writing about it as if it was fact.
Jules: [Jokes] We've changed it now to Penist…
Katie: Ha ha! Penist…No we don't know yet. It might be a bit too jokey. Half of me loves it because it's so punky and we've lived in Berlin and it's [art] everywhere.
It's quite a bold statement to make …
Jules: It's important to us, it meant a lot to us while we were recording our album and we love art.
What kind of art do you mean? Modern? The Arts? Fashion?
Jules: Well, I studied Fine Art so I've always been very creative and I designed all our sleeves and we love painting and pictures, and always think about our songs in colour before we write them. When we're writing songs we always think about the video pre-writing the songs. When we first started we were in a mill full of artists. Katie was doing fashion design and learning how to sew. Then in Berlin, we saw that name. It's actually from a massage parlour called Massage Kunst with fairy lights outside it. We took a picture of it with us standing out the front, sent it to the label and said 'This is the sleeve'. It didn't go down too well, but it was a cool look! We had the word written on the wall the whole time we were recording.
Katie: But it's a subject of huge debate at the moment, so who knows.
How different from your first album, We Started Nothing?
Katie: I mean, it still sounds like 'us'. It's quite percussive because it's just drums, guitar and vocals. We just went through a complete experimentation with each song. If we were listening to a lot of Depeche Mode we'd end up with something like our new single "Hands" which is quite dark electro. But Hands doesn't necessarily sound like the album, because then you've got a song that sounds like TLC or one that sounds like Nancy Sinatra. They're completely random to each other. It's coherent to a degree, but I think it's quite an interesting album because it includes so many different styles in one. Which is sooo us…ha ha ha.
Jules: The way we've listened to music has changed as well. Like most people, we listen to our MP3 players a lot when we're travelling and working and whatever, and we would find we were compiling our own album like you'd compile a playlist. When we started this album, we kept thinking 'We don't want to be pigeon holed into some sort of cool pop punk thing, we want to write pop songs.' So we thought why not write an album that's like a shuffle. It was really selfish, and satisfying every time. We'd write Hands and then we'd want to write a track like Fleetwood Mac. So we'd started getting into harmonies, and it would take on a different life. We just loved going through ten tracks like that.
There were some rumours that you would be collaborating with some pretty major stars on this album. We know that Calvin Harris mixed your new single "Hands" but is there any truth in Jay-Z being involved?
Katie: We changed management recently to a company called Rock Management that Jay-Z's part of, but that was about it. We've met him and he's lovely, but we haven't collaborated with him and we've never planned to really. It was all speculation.
With this in mind, if you could collaborate with any artist alive or dead, who would it be?
Katie: It was always David Burn out of Talking Heads - we're huge fans.
Jules: But we messed that one right up. We were meant to do a collaboration with him but we were busy. We were meant to do a cover of "Once In A Life Time".
Katie: Yeah, he asked us to do it personally for a charity thing, but we couldn't do it because we didn't have the time. Maybe Stevie Nicks (Fleetwood Mac) because I love her voice to sing some of our songs…
The Ting Tings new single, "Hands", hits the stores on 11 October 2010
