"I was going to tell you to dance but I can fucking see I don't have to!" yells lead singer Katie White to the 250 Ting Tings fans, all in black Adidas tracksuits. Everyone's crammed into a black-walled basement club off Hollywood Boulevard that's some cross between Wild Style and Heaven's Gate. The neo-b-boys and girls, Hale-Bopping the night away, are so covered in paint that social boundaries have disappeared, along with the ability to see anything but mushed-up colors. Girls up front are taking their clothes off, but "not in a cheap and sleazy way, but because they felt so free," fellow Ting Jules De Martino says afterwards.
To feel this good in a club you'd usually have to take a pill and wait around Twilo till four in the morning, but the Ting Tings are making tonight feel like every great New Year's Eve and Christmas morning all rolled into one -- and it's not even 10 o'clock yet.
Their first Adidas paint party was held earlier this year in the band's native Manchester and featured a white-blank gallery space populated with partygoers in all-white warm-up suits, Jackson Pollock-ing each other. Tonight is even more manic as De Martino plays his guitar from behind his drums, weaving and building the Tings' direct-response sound from the simple loops he's generating live from a pair of over-the-counter guitar pedals. White alternates between playing guitar so raw and satisfying she's like Meg White on a six-string, and singing like some cross between Debbie Harry and Andrew W.K. It's a sound that has only grown more potent since the Tings dropped their debut album We Started Nothing almost two years ago.
Katie wears a t-shirt and jumpsuit by American Apparel. Jules wears a vintage t-shirt from Screaming Mimi's, jeans by Diesel and sunglasses by Ray-Ban.
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