Jules De Martino, songwriter/musician

Katie and I were playing loads of gigs in Manchester in a band called Dear Eskiimo. We’d got a deal with Mercury. They had committed to an album, but then suddenly changed all their top people and we got dumped. I remember thinking: “Bastards.” No one would answer the phone to us. We felt invisible and rejected. That’s what the lyrics to That’s Not My Name are all about: “They call me Stacey / They call me Her / They call me Jane / That’s not my name.”

We were trying to regroup and lick our wounds by throwing parties. We lived in Islington Mill Studios in Salford, a rundown cotton mill where students would create their textile designs. We only had three songs – That’s Not My Name, Shut Up and Let Me Go and Great DJ – so we’d perform on stage, DJ CDs badly and pump out music. I’d jump on the drums with a loop pedal, Katie would throw on my Strat, we’d art punk it out and it felt amazing.

There was a girl living at the mill who said: “I love what you’re doing. Can I put a record out?” She had this little label called Switchflicker, so we went halves on the £2,000 it cost to print 500 vinyl records of That’s Not My Name and Great DJ as a double A-side.

She helped us get it into the Piccadilly Records shop in Manchester by putting it on the shelf illegally. She was also part of the lesbian club scene, who she started inviting to our parties saying: “They’ve got this great song, That’s Not My Name …” Our parties at the mill went from 20 friends to 40, 60, 80 …

One of the copies got to John Kennedy on XFM. I remember Mark Radcliffe saying “Strike a light!” when he played it on BBC Radio 6. We were also on Myspace, thinking “Someone from Australia just liked us” which seemed outrageous at the time. We were still doing our parties one Friday a month, but the mood had changed because they were increasingly full of industry people – labels and publishers who wanted to sign us – who didn’t have a laugh and cheer along. Three weeks later, we were at the Sanderson hotel in London, negotiating a deal with Sony.

Katie and I have always written together in our own bubble. We produce and write everything ourselves, in our home studio. We’ve been writing for 22 years now. We never dreamed a song would send us around the world six times.

Katie White, songwriter/musician

I’m a working-class girl from near Wigan. I grew up listening to the Spice Girls and all the 90s boy/girl bands. I didn’t really finish school and ended up at the mill, which was a crash course in appreciating other people’s cultures. There would be people talking about Andy Warhol, Talking Heads, Gossip and Le Tigre. My vocal delivery to That’s Not My Name is somewhere between the Spice Girls and Le Tigre, with all this energy, performance and expression.

It was quite an irregular song for us. It probably went though five or six incarnations before it became That’s Not My Name. It started off as a beat, then kept morphing. Eventually, we’d changed the verses so many times, it had turned into a completely different song.

It didn’t really sit in the indie nu-wave/nu-rave scene at the time. NME grabbed hold of us for a while, but then they didn’t know what to do with us because two-year-olds and grandmas were singing along to That’s Not My Name as well. It went into the stratosphere, but has stayed in its own lane. It’s an evergreen song, like My Sharona. You can’t really tell what decade it’s from.

It’s constantly used all around the world. It was in a big Starbucks commercial. It’s been featured in lots of films. It went viral on TikTok three years ago. We get asked to write for other artists because they want us to write that sort of song. It’s definitely given us the ability to continue making the music we want.

We’ve been a couple all along. We never talked about it at the time because we felt it was distracting. There weren’t many duos around and we were quite private. Now we have a little girl who’s nearly five. For the first two or three years, we were flying three or four times a week. We literally toured the first album nonstop for four years. Normally, you’d have somebody at home and have to put the brakes on at some point. But we kept saying, “Yes, we’ll tour South America!” and “Yes, we’ll go to Japan again”. It was all just so exciting.

• The Ting Tings’ new album Home is out now.