The Ting Tings and that difficult second album

Muster what positive thoughts you can about the music industry, pool all good feeling, then draw a mental picture of a record label boss. You've still conjured a crook, I bet, if you're working from the same fund of stereotype and hearsay as me: the sleazeball with swindler's eyes, all hairy wrists and cross-Atlantic accent. These aren't, traditionally, figures of sympathy.

Well after an afternoon with the Ting Tings I want to find every record executive I can, and offer hugs. I want to tour the high-rises of Columbia and Sony BMG handing out blankets. Any A&R type or marketing whiz who has worked with Katie White and Jules de Martino, staunchly contrarian members of this two-piece Salford band, deserves at least a gentle squeeze of the shoulder. Because since scoring a giant hit for their label four years ago – the scrappy dance-rock anthem "That's Not My Name" as omnipresent a feature of 2008 as deathly financial bulletins, as Obama – the Ting Tings have been nothing but trouble.

There was the £100,000 video for "That's Not My Name" that the band didn't like and had scrapped. ("We looked vacant," says White.) There were the demo recordings they "lost" so that the label couldn't use them as bonus tracks on the first album, 2008's We Started Nothing. ("We're control freaks," says De Martino.) More recently they fought to have a piece of emailed-in fan art, imagining them both as putrid corpses, on the cover of a second album, Sounds from Nowheresville, out next month. Last year they slapped a freshly made video for the album's lead-off single, Hang It Up, on to YouTube months before its formal release. "That whole Vevo thing," says White, referring to the online streaming service most bands use to strategically premiere their vids, "is a pain in the arse."

Fairly delighted with themselves – it being a rare thing to have buggered around a label as much as they have without serious consequence – White and De Martino tell me all this between swigs of coffee and punctuating chuckles in a cafe in Salford. She is 29, he is 42, both have hair bleached a matching shock-blond, and they interrupt each other with the familiarity of friends who have spent the last four years almost permanently in each other's company – gigging, city hopping, endlessly writing their delayed second album. The first went to No 1 in May 2008, and it has taken until now for the band to finish a follow-up; enough time for another Obama election to loom, another recession. Where have the Ting Tings been?

De Martino sets the scene. It was autumn 2010, "the two of us in Berlin, in the basement of an old jazz club we've hired. We've been there for nine months making the album."

Right.

"All these compliments from the label about how wonderful the record is. About how big this or that track is going to be on the radio."

Sure.

"And at that point it was a real simple decision…"

Release it.

"Delete it."

Delete it?

"Get rid of it so it doesn't exist. Erase the tracks."

And about now the unexpected sympathy for the team at their label kicks in. De Martino goes on: "Loads of them had flown over from the UK. We played them 10, 11 tracks. But they just came too early."

"Because we were living in Berlin," says White, "we'd got into dance music, and techno, and we did a few dance-type songs. And they [the label guys] were literally going: 'Waa! Dance is huge on the radio at the minute! This is gonna fit right in!' "

"We'd never had anyone tell us how big this or that track was going to be," says De Martino, "because when we were making the first album we were here in Salford, drunk and partying. All of a sudden everyone's there with notepads going: this is fucking huge! And we're like, what do you mean huge? We haven't talked about that."

The Ting Tings were spooked. "And now we're having a massive panic attack about this record we're half way through."

"There was a moment," says White, "when we were like, right, after 10 seconds we're gonna delete these songs. Proper delete them."

And then?

"Two weeks went by," he says. "Everything quiet. They're letting us get on with our work, thinking [rubbing his hands together] it won't be long now, we'll soon get our hands on this record. Finally we get a call: how's it going? We're like: it's not ready. They're like: just send over those demos you played. And we're like: we haven't got them any more.

"I remember," he says, "the silence on the phone."

"So we packed our things and went to Spain," says White.

Their perversity makes a bit more sense when you understand how these two started out.

They met in the 1990s, when White was a teenager and De Martino an art graduate, both of them dissatisfied musicians on the fringes of pop. She'd grown up in the north west, him in London, and in roundabout ways they'd found themselves in failing bands. De Martino was playing guitar with an act called Tomkat, "a boy-band-does-Madness sort of thing", as he once described it, and White was leading a girl troupe called TKO. He'd toured in support of Mel C and her career apogee had been a spot on the bill at an Atomic Kitten gig in St Helens. The pair first got friendly when they were booked into next-door studio rooms in London.

"One day we were discussing Portishead and we decided that outside of trying to make our shit bands work we could secretly try to be Portishead." They enlisted a third member, hip-hop DJ Simon Templeman, and moved into an arts space in Salford called the Islington Mill, an obsolete and barely renovated cotton factory, where they turned an old outhouse into a studio. (The cafe we're sitting in is in the same building, slowly spruced up over the years.) As a trio they named themselves, for reasons lost to everybody, Dear Eskiimo. They got a record deal with Mercury.

If the dud-lives of Tomkat and TKO hadn't made them wary of the pop game, their short time as Dear Eskiimo did. Excited about an early creative pow-wow with the label, White spent a fortnight making a scrapbook of her favourite artwork to stimulate discussion: at the meeting she was asked, instead, something along the lines of whether she'd have a no-tit policy when the inevitable lads' mag shoot came around. Musically, De Martino has said, Dear Eskiimo struggled to recreate their studio sound when they played live. In a 2005 interview he spoke of ominous label uncertainty about how the band should be marketed: by 2006 Mercury had dropped them, no music released.

White and De Martino used what was left of their advance to keep up a residency at Islington Mill, White taking work at a clothes shop in Manchester to supplement it. "We tried to keep [Dear Eskiimo] going and it didn't work," she says. "But the second we destroyed that band, we felt weirdly invigorated." They decided to try again as a duo, and borrowed a name from a Chinese girl who worked at White's shop.

They look back on their emerging efforts as the Ting Tings as "making the best of not a lot". White became an enthusiastic if not very talented guitar player, master of four chords. De Martino moved himself to drums, and songwriting duties were shared. Their big hit, "That's Not My Name", was conceived around the still-stinging disappointment of being dropped. "The song's about feeling so useless and invisible that nobody remembers your name," White once said. "It was a screw you."

A screw you, but a catchy one. Moreish hooks have always been an unashamed part of the Ting Tings equation – the yo-yoing synth in "That's Not My Name", the metronomic bass in "Shut Up and Let Me Go" – on both White basically chatting out lyrics over the top. ("I'm not a great singer, to be honest. I shout most of my songs.") They put on gigs in their converted outhouse, and at one of those, in spring 2007, Sony executive Rob Stringer showed up; before long they were back under the umbrella of a big corporation, signed to Sony subsidiary Columbia. A first single, "Great DJ", edged into the UK top 40 in early 2008 but did better in the US. Then in the summer "That's Not My Name" went to No 1 in the UK at roughly the same time that Apple picked up "Shut Up And Let Me Go" for use in an iPod advert, exposure enough to send the track platinum on its release in America.

This pair, finally, a success! And given their efforts to get there you'd expect White and De Martino to relish it. "The success," says White, carefully choosing her words, "was a bit shit when you actually got it." They went on an exacting tour of gigs and festivals; there were day-long press sessions. Supporting the singer Pink for a fortnight on an American arena tour, De Martino got frustrated – the audience had programmes, he tells me, witheringly – and started improvising drum'n'bass versions of their songs, mid show, without telling White. It caused a row, and somewhere on the road they ended up in a hotel room threatening to stave each other's heads in with a plasticky Vodafone award they'd just won.

"We always said we'd know when to stop touring," says De Martino, "but the truth is you never know. Not until you're so exhausted you're calling your manager a fucking bastard and accusing him of trying to kill you."

It ended, abruptly, at the end of 2009, with White's hospitalisation. Always somewhat prone to medical catastrophe (her social-media dispatches full of declarations like "Feeling better!!! The Tamiflu kicked in I think") she took too many antibiotics before a show in Ohio, collapsed, and was flown home. "Absolutely exhausted," says De Martino. "We just really went for it," says White.

After a period of recovery it was time to get going on the second record. God knows what the label thought when they decided to decamp to a cellar in Berlin to write it, but there was probably a feeling that this wasn't going to be a straight-on-the-shelves-at-Tesco deal when the band toyed with calling the emerging album Kunst. Not long after that came the ill-fated visit to hear the demos, and White and De Martino's decision to torch what work they'd done. "In a way," she says, "it might have been an unconscious way of sabotaging things. To make things feel a bit real again."

De Martino explains. "We can only ever write anything when we're down. Who wants to hear an album from an artist that's happy? Because the content line tends to be: I'm sitting on a beach, how's life for you? And right now a lot of people's answer is likely to be: well not very good actually, we won't buy your record."

Eventually, sheepishly, they went to see Rob Stringer, the Sony boss who'd first signed them. The Berlin deletions had to be explained, and De Martino describes the meeting as "make or break. If that had gone badly we'd have had to get off the label." Stringer, recalls White, told them that having had a few hits already "should free us, not hinder us. He said, I don't care if we earn a penny!"

"And once we had that endorsement…" says De Martino.

Once they had that endorsement they went shopping for a samurai sword to use as a prop in a self-shot music video they made on De Martino's iPhone in a dusty skateboarding bowl in Alicante, Spain. They wrote enjoyable new-album tracks like "Guggenheim", first schemed up by White, they say, when she was pissed in the back of a taxi in Ibiza. The result is the intriguing mix of Sounds from Nowheresville; capricious switches between ups and downs, chart-friendly pop and clubbier stuff – four tracks from the abortive Berlin sessions having been revived after all.

Are there definite hits on there, in the mould of "That's Not My Name"? I'm not so sure. The band claim not to care. "It would have been so easy," says White, "to quickly bash out any old shit off the back of the first album. Get it on the radio, have a cheap nasty hit. And we didn't want to do that."

"If we're gonna wreck it," she'd said earlier, of the career, "we'd rather wreck it ourselves."

They've got complementary hair, and she's been wearing his green anorak all afternoon against the cold. Earlier he gave a gentlemanly whinny of dissent when she described herself, offhand, as "not hot". Is it so crass to wonder if they're a couple? We've spent a lively if occasionally repetitive hour slagging off, at their behest, corporation pop. I reckon I've earned the right to nudge us towards gossip.

They grin, and roll their eyes, and go all floppy and weary: they've been asked about their relationship since the beginning and they've always said no, never a couple. But I want to know: if not, why not?

White: "Well we spend all our time together anyway." De Martino: "Well not all our time." White: "Well pretty much." A pause, for shifty laughter, then De Martino says: "It's like asking why don't I fall in love with Bundie my drum technician. I'm with him all the time." Another pause. "We're driven. Too much, maybe."

"It's become almost like an obsession, our band," says White.

De Martino: "It's not like we're screaming-for-help workaholics. We just never stop. And I think trying to get some sort of normal relationship in all that… it just doesn't work, you know?"

White: "Maybe after we get a few more albums out of our system, we might, like… I don't mean screw each other. I'm talking [about relationships] generally. I don't know. Somebody asked us the other day what our hobbies are. None! We do this 24 hours a day. Maybe that's quite telling."

She doesn't elaborate, and when I return to the subject a second time she says: "I don't like going into personal things. There are bands who really manipulate that. I'd rather sell less records and keep a little bit to myself."

It's a persistent theme, the "sell less records" oblation. They'd rather sell fewer records than appear on a certain billboard, a certain advert. They'd "rather write songs that nobody's gonna hear than write dance tracks that would fit on the radio after [house DJ] David Guetta" – and White "would rather puke on my feet" than that. They'd rather wreck this themselves.

"It's a fine balance, our band," she says. "What makes it work, what makes it not shit. We feel like we could look really cheap quite easily. The second you let other people get involved there's a risk of looking like knobs."

Maybe they're tempting fate. Maybe they've been away too long, the new album will struggle, and the Ting Tings will go the same way as Dear Eskiimo, Tomkat and TKO. Maybe they'll look like nobs. Anyway I admire their gall – to so often moot the idea of collapsing a good thing out of sheer bloody stubbornness.

Hands up: there are inconsistencies in their anti-corporation stance. The record label arranged our interview, for a start, and there's a nice press lady from Sony HQ waiting nearby to make sure the Observer's photoshoot runs smoothly. The Ting Tings' music has been licensed, in the past, for use in Hollyoaks, and an American ad for Fanta ("Grab a taste of Friday!"), and the film He's Just Not That Into You. Still there's something endearing about all these self-set rules they work by; protocols hard-wired, I reckon, by the experience of being dropped, and being sounded out for nudie photoshoots, and being turned lightly bonkers by an adult life too deep in this exasperating thing, the music industry. When De Martino recalls the farrago in Berlin ("The label learned quickly, leave us to get on with it, because when we get pressured…") he sounds like a hostage-taker, a jumpy one who's just placated the encircling police for another hour by sending out an ear.

"We make our own videos, our own records, choose what brands we want to be involved with. It's not difficult," he says. "And the label fear that. Because, obviously, what's their role? You sit there in a meeting and see their egos. It needs to be about them, I did this and I did that."

"There are artists who buy into it who can really look you in the eye afterwards and feel like artists," says White. She shrugs. "It's just different people, different personalities. Who's right and who's wrong? If they're travelling the world and singing somebody else's song, but they're making 20,000 people cry as they're singing it… And, you know, we're playing to 2,000 and the crowd are punking out. Who's to say who's right and who's wrong?"

They leave me to think on that.