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The British charts enjoyed a minor revolution two weekends ago, when Salford DIY duo the Ting Tings scored a number one with their breakthrough single "That's Not My Name."

The boy-girl twosome's track "Shut Up And Let Me Go" is getting some serious Feist treatment on the new iPod advert just now, and things seem good for the Tings' Katie White and Jules DeMartino.

"That's Not My Name" is a killingly addictive candy-coated nursery rhyme, but there's real fire in its belly. Katie White's seething stream-of-consciousness appears to be an innocent list of girls' names. Peel a little behind, and it's actually a damning tale of White's experiences of sexism in the music industry. The pair were briefly signed as Dear Eskiimo, but they never even got anything released. Katie explains in my feature in this week's NME how their marketing meetings involved her staring icy glares back at suits who wanted her to undress for men's magazines.

But I digress. "That's Not My Name" is sharp garage sass in the disguise of a pop song. Girls Aloud aside, that doesn't usually happen, and it's also a neat reversal of the recent trend we've had in the U.K. for callow boy bands disguised as indie combos: Scouting For Girls, the Wombats, those sorts of people. Nevertheless, it seems a one-off.

However, it seems that maybe it won't be. The Bank Holiday Weekend brought news that their album, We Started Nothing, had done the same trick, this week dislodging Neil Diamond from the top album plinth (though their single itself was knocked off by yet another single from Rihanna). British pop has a tradition of shiny singles bands roundly failing to shift many album units. For them to make the double (if not in the same week) is beginning to look like new ground breaking. Ting Tings stubbornly claim that We Started Nothing, but it seems they may be protesting too much.

http://www.nme.com/news/the-ting-tings/36874

OK, if I read one more Katie White interview (including two of my own) in which she says, "I don't understand bands who don't write hooks," then I'm probably going to catch fire. But in the Ting Tings it's looking like British pop might be going back to the glory days of the '80s, where pop with a capital P and real creativity were not mutually (or indeed musically) exclusive.

Hey, they might even help rid the world of Scouting For Girls.

Here's my chat with Katie and Jules at this year's ShockWaves NME Awards U.K.: