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Words from The Times online ..
The Ting Tings at Southampton Guildhall
Life's a scream for the angry young Tings - who thankfully showed no sign of mellowing in this performance
At some point during a show, the band will usually announce that “this is our last song”. But no one has done it quite as unconvincingly as Jules De Martino, the male half of the Ting Tings. Not to have returned to the stage would have been not to perform That's Not My Name which, in turn, might have sparked uproar unseen around these parts since the local football team was relegated to the Championship.
If nothing else, the encore served to provide the Salford duo - De Martino and frontwoman Katie White - with a well-earned breather. The Ting Tings may not spend long on stage, but no one could have accused them of not keeping busy. For We Walk, De Martino sat at the drums playing a guitar while his feet operated a bass drum and hi-hat. Looping his guitar part then allowed him to devote all four limbs to a pounding boilerhouse rhythm. White, meanwhile, stalked the stage like a toy doll hell-bent on vengeance after overhearing Barbie and her friends bitching about her by the lockers.
Wearing an off-the-shoulder green dress and a face that blurred the line between make-up and warpaint, she then donned a guitar and tore into Great DJ with a finger-shredding intensity not always apparent on its parent album We Started Nothing. Effectively doing the work of a third member was White's anger at an industry that objectified her when she worked alongside De Martino in the ill-fated Dear Eskiimo.
The old band may have been no slouches with a well-crafted chorus, but the Ting Tings' eureka moment came with the realisation that a more memorable shout can do the job twice as well. You could have lowered the vocal of James Brown's Get Up Offa That Thing over Shut Up and Let Me Go and it would have been a perfect fit, though not as likely to strike such a chord with the Ting Tings' predominantly female, teenage audience. You were put in mind of the Slits performing I Heard it Through the Grapevine, especially when White dropped her hand on the fretboard and hammered out a spindly white funk coda to her own declamations.
If only because they've had to perform it hundreds of times this year, you wondered if the Ting Tings had left anything in reserve for That's Not My Name. As it turned out, any such worries were unfounded. The sight of White perched atop the drum riser screeching the song's titular complaint - in a manner that might have had even Arthur Janov prescribing her a chill pill - suggested that she is still some way off mellowing. A good job too.
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