- Win The Ting Tings' Brand New CD With MTV's "The Word"

Start: 7.5.2008 End: 14.5.2008

You need to be logged in to enter competitions! Click here to sign up.

This week on the Official Motorola ARIA Chart Show we give you The Word on The Ting Tings.

To be one of the first to own a copy of their brand new CD We Started Nothing, featuring their current single, Great DJ, just tell us in 25 words or less:

Why do you have to just have to own your very own copy of this smash sensation? !

For a bit of inspiration read below for the lowdown on the UK's newest pop prize.

The Ting Tings are Jules de Martino and Katie White. They met after  bonding over a shared ambition to rock the foundations of pop music.

Brought up on an exclusive musical diet of radio pop music ("any old crap really") on a farm in the delightfully named Slag Lane ("try living with that in the school playground"), Katie is quite the most unusual front woman you might expect to crossover as the figurehead of Manchester's Bohemian margins. She speaks as she finds, admits to being fired up by 'a massive chip on me' shoulder' and hadn't heard of The Smiths until she moved into The Mill.

Jules is the ying to Katie's yang. East London born and bred, with a surfeit of early art school experience, his Metropolitan charms are a direct counterbalance to Katie's brusque Northern manner. He can appear a little more pragmatic than his frontwoman but for the moment that you hear him pounding the drums as her musical foil. Ting Tings are very much a two-way operation. They share lyric and music writing duties. "If it feels right," he says, "then it goes in, whoever has come up with it."

The heart of The Ting Ting's plucky, arty, double-headed power-pop assault is back home at The Mill. Home to sculptors, painters, webbos and DIY musicians given free reign to do what they want with their private areas of creativity. Too urbane to be called a commune, the only time the occupants of this diverse and scintillating space came together was for ad hoc club nights that became word of mouth Mancunian sensations a year or so ago. "There weren't many places that you could go and get off your face to white noise back then," notes Katie.

Jules and Katie have been writing together for over four years. They began exchanging visits between Manchester and London ("I'd stay at her dad's farm and we'd write in a barn," explains Jules, "it was a cheap way of doing things") before Jules decided to bite the bullet and up sticks to the North for good.

"Suddenly I was angry," says Katie, picking up the tale. "And I had something to sing about." The defining moment came in their studio at The Mill when Jules had returned back to his first love, drumming, and Katie decided to pick up the guitar. The Ting Tings were taking shape. "She played a D chord that I'd taught her, badly. She was swinging the guitar round and screaming and kept dropping it. That was the moment. We found our energy through a bum chord that turned into Great DJ. We created a loop and we were off."

Together, Jules and Katie have configured a sound that represents the pure heart of British pop. Driven by personality, unstoppable momentum, friendship and the love of great pop music - however stylised it arrives - The Ting Tings learnt to forget the attention to detail that they had slaved over in Dear Eskiimo and drove their new beast on raw adrenaline. It is littered through their sensational debut album, a record that grips on first listen and refuses to dislodge from the brain. Snappy choruses trade off against angular guitar work, whipsmart drumming and a succession of loops that they create live with the use of delay pedals. Half redolent of a thrusting girlband schooled at CBGBs, and half informed by a post modern desire to break the codes of manufactured pop, their sound is immediately identifiable and purposefully perky.

True to form, The Ting Tings debut single for Columbia was the song they divined together first off, the song that marked their entry into becoming a great pop band. Great DJ's singular attitude and no-nonsense call to arms (The Girls! The Boys! The Strings! The Drums!) melted the airwaves at Radio One, becoming the first non-chart eligible record to be A listed two months upfront.

If The Ting Tings debut album sounds like the sound of 2008, then many agree. Touted as a must-hear by industry symposiums and kids on the corner of urban High Streets alike, it is live that the whole enterprise takes on its full three dimensions. Unsurprisingly, they were chosen to open the annual NME New Music Tour at the beginning of 2008. The competition was duly sleighed by the pair that started making music for no-one but themselves.

The Ting Tings intuitive pop noise is about propulsive energy, positive thinking and smashing up a couple of rules along the way. Who really wouldn't want a little piece of that?

The album We Started Nothing is out May 24.