“Meadow wanted to say hi,” says the Ting Tings’ Katie White, holding her daughter by the armpits. Meadow, a miniature version of Katie, giggles, chirps “Hi,” waves to me, then skips off to watch her television program. “She had a little puke this morning, so we kept her home from school,” Katie explains.
Parenting has been top of mind for Katie and her Ting Tings partner, Meadow’s father Jules De Martino, since their daughter arrived in the summer of 2020. After years of setting up homes in random corners of the world on a whim, they drove an RV from their native U.K. to Spain, landed in Ibiza, and never left.
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“Ibiza is a weird place, because there’s all different types of people here,” admits Katie. “Spain’s a relaxed place and Ibiza is an island off the coast of that so it’s super relaxed. It took us six months to relax into it. In London, Amazon Prime gave us same day delivery of loo roll if we ran out. Here, it would be six weeks later and your parcel’s lost and they can’t find it. But it has given us space.”
The Ting Tings found mainstream success early with their 2008 debut, We Started Nothing. Their much-licensed hits “That’s Not My Name” and “Shut Up and Let Me Go” struck a global chord. Swept into a cycle of touring, promotion and awards—they were nominated for two Brits and a Grammy—the unassuming Manchester duo weren’t the most cooperative pop stars.
Each album since has marked a stylistic shift, with their latest, Home, settling into soft rock. The album channels Fleetwood Mac, Toto, Christopher Cross, The Eagles, and Steely Dan. It’s a breezy, lavender-scented trip to the heart of the ’70s.
Katie, in a straw hat, lace-front top, and floral vest, embodies the sound of Home. Jules, in a hoodie and baseball cap, reflects its studio soul. Even over Zoom, their synergy is clear. They finish each other’s thoughts while recounting the long road that brought them to Ibiza, dancing around their house with Meadow, to yacht rock.
Do you think being a couple makes navigating artist life easier?
Jules De Martino: Life is a performance, and on top of that, you’re an artist and you’re performing. You start to create your character within your success, every band does. Being in a couple, the minute I start getting boisterous, Kate’s like, “It’s not cool. Chill the fuck out.” Kate, same thing. She’s singing, and everyone’s going crazy. We go backstage, and I’d be like, “You’ve got no time for me.” We have these things that are totally real. You’re not a boy band where everyone’s doing their shit and separating and going home. You’re together 100% of the time and you can’t let anything take over.
Katie White: We have tried to kill each other a few times over 20 years.
JD: The thing that keeps everything real is you can’t fake it with each other. You’re dealing with your shit together as a couple all the time. You’re not in a band where you can rely on your bass player to help drink away your sorrows and not worry about family or friends. It’s not in our character to do that anyway, but it is helped by being a couple. That automatically gives you a massive amount of stability until, as you know, in many duos it goes wrong. If it goes wrong between us two, it’s done. We always made sure that we never got ourselves in the position where anything meant more than what we were in our relationship.
KW: We wouldn’t let anything come between us, not even our decision making. At the time of our first album, we toured nonstop for four years. We flew every day for two years straight, and that was amazing. We did that because we were a couple. Normally, if you were in a band, you’d have somebody building your home life up. If we had somebody at home, at some point, you’d put the brakes on. We didn’t build a home life. Even now, we’re a bit floaty. We don’t seem to settle that well. Now that we have a child, we try really hard to be more settled. But we still have this instinct, like three months ago, we were like, “Let’s move to Nashville.”
What is it about the nomadic lifestyle that appeals to you?
KW: We were quite impulsive, and we’re both as bad as each other. We would go, “I’m bored. I don’t know what to do in my life. Let’s move countries.” And we’d just move two weeks later. We built a life in a different country for every album. We didn’t realize it at the time, but it became part of the process. You can reinvent yourself, be somebody new, free yourself up for writing.
JD: It was in the DNA at the very start of the Ting Tings. We weren’t ever going to make the same record twice.
What was it like adjusting to your rapid success?
JD: Suddenly, we were faced with promo, touring, and being looked after like we’re children. We’ve never felt comfortable in that area. We love playing live, but if I’m being honest, the commercial touring is fantastic. We’ve had an amazing time, but it’s not as organic as we thought it would be surrounded by people pulling you to be in the right place at the right time.
I’ve done music all my life, so has Kate. Music was always something you passionately, organically fell in love with. When you commercialize it, it gets hard. We’re very fortunate. We’re privileged to be in this position. We’ve had hit records. We’ve seen the whole world six times over. The concept of writing music and loving what you do and trying to get better at it goes fucking out the window the minute you have a hit record.
From that very beginning, we buckled. It wasn’t like we couldn’t cope, we just struggled with it.
How did you find balance again after everything shifted so fast?
JD: We were always trying to bend the rules to fit our needs, hence why we went to Berlin. What a great thing to dismantle everything, to get to a place where you have no idea who you are again, or where you are, or who your friends are. That set us off writing. That’s what makes you feel like a musician. That’s what makes you feel inventive.
Then finally, on our third album, we broke free and became independent. And it was amazing. We did an amazing tour with amazing musicians on buses all over Europe, just bliss. They were our family. For 15 years we’ve been working with that crew. This new record feels like an extension of that.
How does Home feel like an extension of that?
JD: The idea was, we’ve got 1000 bucks, which is how we started out. How would we make a record and make it count for 1000 bucks? It’s easy to say that sitting in a position of hit records and a lot of syncs on our music. It funds us. We’re able to feed ourselves with our music. It sounds a cliche, four albums in and going, “We’ve only got 1000 bucks.” Why would you do that? But it’s stimuli. If you put yourself in that real honest position, maybe you can write some real honest songs.
KW: With this album, we’re very much completely on the same page. Other albums we might have been 80% on the same page—and you can feel that as well. Jules has been going on for years about making this type of record. We were watching Steely Dan in New York. I was in my mid-20s and I was so bored. Now I’m so angry at my 25-year-old self. Why did I have to get to this age to comprehend, or to have that music resonate with me? It feels like we’ve collided creatively again.
It’s so naive in a lovely way. You can’t be naïve a second time. With this record, we’ve let go of trying to chase anything. We thought, “Let’s write songs that we love. just for the love of songwriting.” It was the first time since that first album where we felt naive in a different way, or we felt free. Having a child, you don’t have time to overthink. We would write lyrics that we wouldn’t normally put in a song. We’d go, “Oh, that’s too literal.” But people connect with it so well. It’s not cheesy. It’s not too simplified. They’re just nice songs. That’s what we want, storytelling. We want to get old writing songs like this.
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