The Ting Tings
Katie and Jules were in Berlin for a Tommy Hilfiger campaign thing, playing E-Werk. I met them at Soho House a few days before the show, and Jules immediately started talking about sunglasses—not as a metaphor, just the actual collection she’d been building. She bought cheap ones because the expensive ones disappeared, got stolen at restaurants, broke randomly. Someone had once given her a box of broken sunglasses while she was standing alone behind a factory in winter, which is the kind of detail that tells you what following The Ting Tings meant to some people.
Katie and Jules had been in a punk band called TKO when they were teenagers. No record, no real success. By the time their debut came out in 2008, something had taken off. They were moving fast enough that they’d wake up unsure which city they were in. Jules had been warned that Jakarta was dangerous—the hotel inspecting their room constantly—but once she actually talked to people, the city felt fine. Katie remembered a man selling baby rabbits there, holding one up to her face, and she’d fallen in love with it immediately, which broke her heart that she couldn’t take it with her. Istanbul was just constantly full of people partying. Berlin had been home for nearly a year.
Katie told me about a fan who rushed the stage with his arms wide open and she thought for a second something terrible was about to happen. Security tackled him just in time. Jules had a worse story. A girl, maybe fifteen, had followed them from gig to gig, standing alone in the cold under bridges or behind factories. When Jules told her it was dangerous to be out like that, the girl handed her a box full of sunglasses—all of them broken—and just ran off. That was pretty creepy,
Jules said, and she wasn’t exaggerating.
Fashion-wise, Jules kept it simple. Corduroys, regular T-shirts, whatever cheap sunglasses she’d picked up. Katie was into Creepers (Susie from Style Bubble had recommended them), and she’d started a little fashion blog called Stop That Car!
Neither of them made a big deal out of it.
The name Ting Tings
had come from a girl Katie used to work with in a clothes shop. In Chinese, the girl had told her, it meant something like old park bandstand
and also listen, listen.
They’d also found out it sounded like sweet penis
in Japanese, which made them laugh. As for how they broke through: they played a demo tape to a DJ at a party, and a few days later they’re in their kitchen drying dishes and their own song comes on the radio, and they just started jumping around the flat. Katie said Pet Shop Boys. Jules said something in German. The mix probably made sense.
By the end of the conversation I was pretty sure they weren’t the type to sit around counting money and wanting to be left alone. Shows meant everything to them. There was something straightforward about how they talked about their lives—no performing, no mythology. Just the actual shape of what it felt like to be them.