The Cheap Ones Never Get Stolen
The broken sunglasses box is the detail I keep coming back to. Jules from The Ting Tings described a girl—fifteen, maybe—who’d been following them from show to show across Europe, standing alone under bridges in the cold, waiting at fence lines. One evening they found her outside a factory and Jules tried to send her home. She pressed a box full of sunglasses into his hands and bolted before he could refuse. Every pair inside was smashed. He called it creepy. I found it sort of devastating—the gift as compulsion, the refusal to accept the refusal hardwired in.
Katie had her own story. A man rushed the stage at one of their shows, squeezed between the bodyguards, and came at her with his arms spread wide. Security tackled him at the last second. She stood there in shock. The gap between adoration and menace is basically nothing.
I met Katie and Jules at the Soho House in Berlin before their E-Werk show—they were back in the city, which had been their home for the better part of a year. Easy, relaxed, happy to be onstage again after a year in the studio. We’re not a band that just wants to make money and be left alone,
Katie said. We love gigs.
She meant it in the way people mean it when they’ve actually thought about the alternative.
Jules collects sunglasses obsessively and has developed a firm philosophy about it: buy cheap. The expensive ones disappear suddenly, break, or get stolen. You leave them on a restaurant table for five minutes—gone. That doesn’t happen with the cheap ones.
He buys his favorites from a small shop in New York. There’s something philosophically correct about this that I appreciate—the throwaway as the keeper, the disposable as the durable.
Katie’s into experimenting. Creepers at the time we met—she stretched her feet out mid-sentence to show me, big chunky soles, completely unbothered by whether they were fashionable or not. Susie Bubble had recommended the brand. She’d also just started her own small fashion diary, Stop That Car!, somewhere to put the overflow.
The band name came from a girl Katie had worked with at a clothing shop. Her name was Ting Ting. She explained that in Mandarin it referred to old park bandstands—it meant "listen, listen." There was also something about the sound of innovation. Two people, rhythm-heavy—it fit. What Katie hadn’t known until later was that in Japanese the phrase means something else entirely. Sweet penis,
Jules said, both of them laughing. Better than small, at least.
Before The Ting Tings there was TKO, a teenage punk band that went nowhere—no deal, no traction. The old members have scattered into families and different lives. Katie doesn’t think there’s much jealousy. Maybe not. But the question always contains its own awkwardness: you’re essentially asking someone to rate how much other people resent them.
The moment they knew something was shifting: Katie and Jules were in their kitchen drying dishes when their demo came on the radio. A DJ friend they’d handed the tape to at a party days earlier had played it. That’s Not My Name. They dropped everything and jumped around the flat. That image is better than most origin stories I’ve heard. No industry showcase, no A&R showcase. Just a kitchen, a dish towel, and their own song arriving from somewhere unexpected.
On tour they barely see the cities they pass through—sometimes three in a day, no time to step outside. Jakarta was strange: they were warned it was dangerous, got security escorts everywhere, constant room inspections. But on the ground, talking to actual people, Jules found it genuinely nice. Katie remembered a man on a market stall selling rabbits, holding a tiny baby one up toward her face. It nearly broke her heart to leave without it. Istanbul she described as electric, full of young people who seemed to be permanently mid-party. And then Berlin, which was practically home.
I asked what they were listening to. Katie said Pet Shop Boys. Jules said he was working through a French for beginners course. That pairing is somehow completely right.