The Ting Tings stormed the stage at Kings College London this week to the point where I considered the venue too small for them. The dirty pop urchins were initially subdued while strumming their way through two cracking, rock openers from second album Sounds From Nowheresville. Katie White’s singing and movements were restrained to begin with but her guitar work was wonderfully nasty, while Jules De Martino operated multiple instruments like a Dick Van Dyke and Cyberdog lovechild, working the excellent nursery grunge tracks with a seamless bleed into first album favourites Great DJ and Fruit Machine. The crowd showed their appreciation by getting bouncy, forming a mutual repartee with the stomping pop thumpers as White came out of her shell and De Martino upped tempo.
After seeing them support Tom Jones at the Union Chapel with an acoustic set, I was determined to catch The Ting Tings live in their full fluorescent pop outfit and was far from disappointed. Despite being awkwardly positioned too close to the left hand speaker at the front and subsequently half deafened by a wave of base heavy noise traffic (this was not the band’s fault) I was soon swept into the sea of bopping bodies and the electric atmosphere spawned on by some simply terrific pop songs. New tracks stood well, complimenting the old with their fusion of pop, punk and rap and Katie White’s gesticulation to the crowd with a spoken word number and progressive pop rap attack led nicely into a sprawling version of the first second album single, Hands. This turned out to be one of the most memorable tracks of the night; a critically underrated, vast soundscape that bled from a pulsating quasi-techno beat into a thrashing dance crescendo.
The night ended with first album numbers We Walk and That’s Not My Name and while the whole set only lasted just over one hour there was an air of satisfaction felt amongst the beer splattered not-quite-teeny boppers. Even though they are perceived by some as the classic blue-print for a one album wonder band, the Ting Ting’s ability to successfully blend elements from different genres into striking, catchy pop songs shows that they do have the ability to break from the mould and grow old gracefully. If they can deliver a haunting, acoustic led set at the Union Chapel and perform with such bouncing vibrancy at the Kings College, I have no doubt that they will in time change the way a lot of people (and critics) feel about them. Let’s just hope they cling to their arty punk rap routes and don’t get swayed into the MOR pop lane.
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