ROOTSS: "Reflections Of One That Says So": ConnecTiNg Tings

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

ConnecTiNg Tings

Wednesday, 14th January 2009

Yesterday, I went out on a limb to blog good things about the senior pastor of my church.

Today, I am going out on another limb to blog good things about a secular pop band...

Sometime in May last year, I was at Bishan Junction 8 shopping with my family and went to the Sembawang Music Centre store there specifically to buy a CD album that was just released entitled We Started Nothing by a British pop band called The Ting Tings.

I have mentioned before that I am entrenched in the music of the 1980s because that was the era I grew up in. So why did I end up buying this album? That is because they sound very much like a band from the 1980s, and when I listen to their music, it makes me feel like a teenager all over again.

The duo is made up of Jules de Martio and Katie White. Jules was born in 1973 and grew up as a child of the 1980s. He composed their tunes, hence the heavy 1980-ish influence. Katie was born in 1983, and looks/sounds like a mixture between Debbie Harry of Blondie and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, two bands from that era that were fronted by female lead singers.

My daughter in now in Secondary One. At the end of last year, she went for a camp entitled ConnecTiNG, which were meant for the Primary Sixes to get connected to TNG (The Next Generation), which is what our church's Youth Service is called. (That is why the letters T, N and G in the word "ConnecTiNG" are capitalised.

Well, in a similar way, the Ting Tings are also connecting the current generation (ie. teenagers like my kids) to the previous generation (ie. uncles and aunties in our forties like yours truly) because they are a current pop band playing music that sounds like it is coming from the previous generation.

Hence the title of today's post :-)

When I found out that they were coming to Singapore to perform in a concert, I just had to go and get a pair of tickets to watch the gig with my daughter. (The last time I saw a pop concert was with my wifey when Richard Marx was in town performing at the Indoor Stadium, and that was back in the early 1990s).

And so, on last night, father and daughter had a time of great time of bonding together, enjoying the music of the Ting Tings. Here is a photo that my daughter took of me as the entrance of Fort Canning Park, where the gig was held.

You can see this and other photos taken at that concert which have been uploaded to Facebook at the following link:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=54970&l=e4306&id=751059341

I checked out the 3,000-strong crowd, and sure enough, they were made up of both teenagers like my daughter and older foggies like myself.

Oh ya, I thought the following is worth mentioning. The Ting Tings performed all 10 songs on their album: 8 first and then an encore of 2. When they reappeared on stage to perform Impacilla Carpisung, Jules was fooling around with his track sampling device and out came bits of Walk This Way by Run DMC and Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr, confirming how much he is influenced by the music of the 1980s has on him :-)

Here is a video which I uploaded to YouTube showing snippets of the concert.