“LOOK at us two idiots, everybody is clapping us.” No, not an insight into the cogs slowly turning in Liam Gallagher’s head but the light-hearted response from Katie White when she tries to fathom how she and fellow Ting Tings member Jules De Martino have risen from embryonic to emphatic in less than a year.

“When we are on stage it’s all ego and attitude but when we come off we just go ‘oh my god’ and start laughing,” chuckles singer Katie, from Salford, whose on-stage antics could give the Duracell bunny a run for its money.

“We did a gig in London and the crowd were going mental. We were still an unknown band yet they knew all our songs. I was trying to give it all my attitude but I couldn’t help smirking at Jules on drums then turning around to be moody again.”

The pair had a busy festive period, wrapping up a tour supporting Reverend And The Makers then embarking on a solid month of gigs alongside Does It Offend You Yeah?, The Jing Jang Jongs and The Cribs as part of the Shockwaves NME Awards Tour. Things are not likely to let up over the next few months either, with trips to Japan and America booked before their own UK tour. And there’s the small matter of an album due out in early summer.

“We’ve only got one week off in May and one week at the end of the year,” adds Katie. “But I spent the whole year before this completely bored and frustrated so it’s nice to be busy.”

If you’ve seen Katie on-stage, then “busy” is something of an understatement. Her air-punching, breathless yells and the beatings she dishes out to the bass drum make for exhausting viewing.

“I’ve been in bands before with more members yet there is more energy when it is just the two of us,” she says. “I have no idea why but you can feel it on stage, that you are having more impact than, say, a stage with four people.

“I am totally knackered when I come off, it’s like my very own workout. But the way I throw myself about, I didn’t think to do this for the sake of it. It’s because I basically have to wind myself to get the high-pitched noises out.”

So far, windings have been the only on-stage injuries, though Katie does report a groin strain from carrying the bass drum up several flights of stairs, while Jules’s load-carrying has led to the odd stairwell plummet. And both were struck down with flu on the NME tour. “Jules was a bit braver than me and kept gigging,” admits Katie.

In a bid to extend their set to keep up with demand, both band members have been kept busy. “At the moment, Jules is modifying his loop pedals; he triggers them during the set with his feet and we want more. So he has been busy soldering stuff together,” says Katie.

“And I am doing my first guitar solo now. I couldn’t tell you how I am doing it but I just keep on experimenting. I’ve only really been trying to learn guitar for the past six months. Jules was on the drums and I was like ‘what am I going to do?’

“So I picked his guitar up and just played the B chord for about three hours then I put my hand in the wrong place by accident and it made this weird note and Jules was like ‘that’s brilliant’. It’s a bit random that the fact I couldn’t play very well helped find our unique sound.”

The band’s name came from a similarly random source, chosen as Katie used to work with a Chinese girl called Ting Ting, which in Chinese mandarin means an old bandstand.

“I just thought it was a lovely name. We Googled it and found it meant innovation, that ‘ting’ sound when you have an idea.

“A name’s nothing til you put your mark on it and we’ve had quite a few ting moments since, especially on the album where things just seem to be coming out really easily.

“We didn’t have any problems with the writing. Sometimes the ideas can dry up but it was literally so easy and it was so exciting to say ‘let’s try this’ and then it worked, ‘let’s try that’ and it worked too.”

When not writing, gigging, straining groins or suffering from flu, Katie can be found engrossed in a good book (she is reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography at the moment) or watching a Michael Palin Around The World In 80 Days on DVD. “If we ever got to support someone on tour then it would be him,” laughs Katie, “as then we could go everywhere, just hanging behind him playing music!”