Pop Art

"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.

Back then, the Ting Tings were another in a long line of UK outfits churning out not-quite-disco for indie rock kids to dance to, and they had a tight little record to prove it. Tonight, White and De Martino are the gang of two whose sets have been the highlight of European festivals and whose songs have transcended hipster pigeonholing to become pop at its most unlikely and uncanny. From the anthemic "We Walk," to "Shut Up and Let Me Go" of the ubiquitous iPod commercial, from "Great DJ" ("the drums, the Drums, the DRUMS, THE DRUMS!") to the cheerleader shout-out "That's Not My Name," their songs are like stiff drinks the Tings keep buying rounds of.

"We had paint parties before we got signed," De Martino explains. Four years ago, the Tings were playing their own parties, putting blank record sleeves on the walls and inviting friends to paint them (and each other) at the Manchester-area mill-turned-commune where they lived. Art -- not clubbing -- was the impetus. "I didn't really get inspired by DJ culture," De Martino says.

The Mill was the kind of place, White remembers fondly, "where it was normal to see some Japanese psychedelic band any night of the week." Normal these days is a dozen dates opening for Pink. "We've gotten offers to support really big bands before and we've always turned them down," White explains. "But Pink's just so no-bullshit. For us it's a chance to learn how she does it for ten years." For De Martino, it's just a pain in the ass. "Oh, gawd it's a logistical nightmare. You can't smoke over here. You play more than a half-hour, you get fined 500 dollars."

The paint party is the Tings back on their terms -- free gig, free beer. As De Martino yells mid-show, "This is where music and art come together!" Or, at least paint, Bud Light and the funnest music you can imagine.

The two first met in 2001 when De Martino wrote songs for White's mercifully short stint in all-girl pop-punk trio TKO. So much for grrl power -- but the pair bonded over a mutual love of Portishead, formed a band, got a deal, and watched hopelessly as the band dissolved in a mess of record company miscues. The two were devastated. White, ten years De Martino's junior, took it worse. "I was 21 or 22 and just thought, 'Fuck it, it's over, no one will ever listen to our music," White sighs.

In 2004, De Martino still had a basement rehearsal space in the Mill, and with nothing to lose -- except maybe the space -- he set up his looping pedals and started playing drums and guitar. When White reconnected with her old bandmate and picked up a guitar, the Ting Tings were born. Or rather, liberated. "When we started to get drunk and make art, we didn't think anything was going to happen beyond feeling really free. When it doesn't matter, you enjoy it for enjoyment's sake," De Martino says.

De Martino, 36, explains the older brother, younger sister dynamic with the less-jaded White, 26, who cheerfully admits to having been a Spice Girls fan as a teenager when De Martino was playing in punk bands. "I'm a better drummer and guitarist than Katie," he begins. "I would probably play something 'correctly,' she'll play it badly, but that's what makes the best moments." Like? "On 'Shut Up and Let Me Go,' we were messing about on the track with loops and bass lines and it was sounding a bit like 'Another One Bites the Dust' but then Katie started this one chord, playing drums on guitar basically, and immediately we were both like 'Track's finished, that's it.'"

Unlike more calculated (and arguably calculating) prodigies like Lady Gaga or rockier indie dance groups (Klaxons, Does It Offend You, Yeah?), or even the character-driven Calvin Harris, the Tings' sound is wholly hedonistic, music for enjoyment's sake -- primarily their own, the rest of the world be damned.

Damning the rest of the world has gotten them this far. Weeks before the Pink tour, for instance, they up and left their Manchester stomping grounds for Berlin. "We don't know German. We'd only been there four times doing shows," De Martino explains. "But going back to the Mill would be all our friends plugging into the free booze, and we've already done that. There's no risk. In Berlin, there's a couple of video directors we know, we have a couple of fine art friends, but other than that, we're totally lost," he says, adding what just might be the Ting Tings' mantra: "We tend to destroy things when we're feeling too comfortable."

The move -- or at least the discomfort -- has been fruitful so far. "We've written three songs already," De Martino continues. "Our album wasn't as heavy as we are live, so that'll be different this time -- we've been on the road for a year and a half."

The sound, De Martino says, is already different, experimental but more accomplished. "The first couple of songs in Berlin were the result of new friends, new food," De Martino says. "We've actually been playing these electro keyboards, but the first song we wrote was on this really cheesy little electric piano keyboard."

The real difference, he admits, is White. "Katie's more confident," he says.

For White, who just three years ago was working retail and trying to figure out how to hold a D chord (she still can't fit all her fingers on the frets), the transformation into a worldwide pop star has been nurturing. "I feel like a completely different person than I did two years ago," she says. Her confidence has translated into new ideas for the Tings' live show.

It won't include paint ("You can't do those shows too often, you ingest too much paint," she laughs), but it will be something. The Pink shows have been inspiring. "Seeing how Pink uses the trapeze, just what you can do with a big budget, it's really opened our eyes." She's been watching the Talking Heads' concert film Stop Making Sense a lot. "What they were able to do so simply was really powerful."

"We've always been really drawn to how you can take a blank space and do something with it," De Martino says. "It's like an article of clothing: you start with your material and two hours later you have something."

But for as much as art is about creation, perhaps what the Ting Tings have going for them is that, as White points out, echoing De Martino, "When we're locked in, we're quite destructive."

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