After a tough break-up, Katie White and Jules De Martino decided to stay together.
The U.K. natives were once two-thirds of the dance pop band Dear Eskiimo. But after being signed to a major label, the trio only lasted "about a year" before "it all went wrong," according to De Martino. After Dear Eskiimo, singer-guitarist White and drummer De Martino renamed themselves The Ting Tings, a name that comes from a Mandarin term for "band stand" and, well, whatever White wants it to, from "the sound of an open mind" to "the 'ting' you hear when you get an idea."
Regardless of what it means, we've all been hearing alot of it lately thanks to the iPod commercial which made their song Shut Up And Let Me Go an overnight sensation. The group first picked up momentum with two indie singles, That Is Not My Name and Great DJ and signed with Sony Records late last year. Their debut, We Started Nothing, is so chock full of catchy dance punk that Rolling Stone likens it to the best of Gwen Stefani or Kylie Minogue.
As their star rises, White and De Martino say they won't make the same mistake twice: "We had this thing in our last band where we constantly took advice from people... [s]o in this band we sort of made the unconscious decision to just not listen to any advice anybody gave us."
