Ting Tings Resist the Urge to Collaborate

Posted on Nov 14th 2009 12:00PM by Steve Baltin
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With the news that Jay-Z has signed the Ting Tings to his Roc Nation, rumors are swirling he wants to work with the British duo. If they do end up collaborating, it will be under the direction of Katie White and Jules De Martino, as De Martino says they're determined to produce their new record themselves.

"We produced our first record ourselves and we're gonna be producing this record ourselves as well," De Martino tells Spinner. "We love to experiment in the recording, we throw everything at the wall. It's a very kind of unorthodox way of recording and I think it kind of made the record sound different. So I think we'll probably stick to that method, go on our own and do it."

In fact, De Martino says the pair have felt the collaboration urge before but have resisted, even with some of music's biggest names. "We were at a party and we were introduced to Dr. Dre and he's made some absolutely phenomenal records. Just the level of success and power he gets in his records is phenomenal. We were chatting and I could feel that there was an expression of like, 'Well, why don't you do one of our tracks?'" De Martino says. "Rick Rubin sent messages at the beginning and he came to our early gigs and he's just done the Gossip's new record."

De Martino admits the thought has been there. "It's so tempting to go to one of these big successful professional producers, but I think we're just maintaining we're gonna turn our heads away from that kind of experience," he says.

As previously reported, the pair is planning to take Berlin for the second album and they already have a studio set up. "We found an old jazz club in a basement that'd been shut down a couple of months -- they had a drug raid or some sort of licensing problem with booze so they had to shut it down -- and the building's amazing," De Martino says. "It's like a big art space above it and where this jazz club was, a tiny little stage and we just converted it into a studio. We brought all our equipment over from Manchester. We set the whole thing up."

With the move to Berlin, the pair also plan to bring along the paint parties that started in Manchester, as it's a part of the music. "We have a lot of ideas about what kind of art we want to include in our music. We're big fans of art; we don't just sit writing on acoustic guitars like Bob Dylan crossing the Arizona desert," he says. "We have more an alternative way writing our songs, we do a lot of art work, design all our sleeves on canvases, and in between that we're recording at the same time. It's almost like thinking in color."