Songfacts®:

• The Ting Tings are the UK duo of drummer Jules De Martino and singer-guitarist Katie White. They were originally in a band called Dear Eskimo together with a DJ called Simon Templeman. The trio signed to Mercury in 2004 only to find the people who liked them leave the label and they were subsequently dropped. This experience inspired the defiance of this song.
  
  "'That's Not My Name' is about feeling transparent, invisible," White said in a Songfacts interview. "We had been dropped by Mercury Records in 2006-2007 and felt like damaged goods. I was 20-21 and felt like my career was over already."
  
  "News that we had failed spread around," De Martino added. "We felt desperate and useless. The band collapsed and Katie and myself without our third member from the previous band started The Ting Tings and had a lot to say about how we were feeling."
• "That's Not My Name" was originally released in 2007 as The Ting Tings' first single as a limited-edition 7-inch record. They were on a local label called Switchflicker at the time, but soon came to the attention of bloggers and scenesters, and the record labels were queuing up to sign them. After signing to Columbia, "Great DJ" was released in the UK as their major-label debut single and failed to chart. "That's Not My Name" came next and shot to #1 in May 2008 ("Great DJ" was then re-released and hit #33).
  
  In America, the first Ting Tings song to make an impact was "Shut Up and Let Me Go" thanks to its use in an Apple commercial in 2008. "That's Not My Name" didn't reach its chart peak in the US of #39 until August 2009.
• Pop Justice asked Katie White if she realized straight away that this was a hit record. She replied: "I loved it straight away but I felt like my judgment had been screwed because we went through our old band [Dear Eskimo] and it all went wrong, so I thought 'what the hell do I know - I obviously don't have good ears.' But when we started playing it live it became quite electric and the hairs on my arms were standing up, and it felt like it had a lot of power behind it."
• This song struck a chord with women who had been through the indignity of being referred to as "her" or "girl" by guys who can't be bothered to remember their names. Or even worse, mixed up with other girls ("They call me Stacy... They call me Jane.").
  
  Katie White's lyric dealt specifically with her record label experience but rings true for any woman who wants to be heard.
• Tings Katie White recalled to the Guardian June 28, 2008 that the duo were sorting their laundry when they first heard they had reached #1 in the UK, ending Madonna's four-week reign at the top with "4 Minutes."
  
  She said: "We were playing Manchester that night, but we had to do a load of washing first, and the (BBC Radio 1) chart show were ringing us - you have to do this fake thing where they ring you during the day and you have to pretend it's the evening, and I'm a really bad actress. I was like, 'Yeah, it's good!' We played the Academy that night and the whole audience was really hyped up. I didn't want to mention being number one till we got to playing 'That's Not My Name,' so I could thank them, but the audience kept shouting, 'You've knocked Madonna off #1.'"
• In the same Guardian interview White discussed the way this song explores the way she was treated as a young woman in the music industry, with its long list of women's names and the refrain, "Are you calling me darling?" She explained: "The first marketing meeting we had with our last label, I'd gone to all the effort of making a look book of all my favorite art and photographs, just to show them what I'm about. And I took it in and they said, 'Oh, yeah, great...' They didn't even look at it, just pushed it to one side and asked if I was prepared to take my kit off for men's magazines. And I was like, Aaargh! There's plenty of girls who can do that, and they've got bigger boobs and better faces, and I've got no idea why they thought I might do that. I would feel terrible doing that - I could never do it in a million years."
• Two videos were made for the song. The video for the American market was directed by Alex and Liane, who also helmed the Ting Tings' "Shut Up and Let Me Go." It was filmed in the desert 40 minutes north of Los Angeles and features visual effects done by means of a reflective material called Scotchlite (also utilized in Nik Kershaw's video for "Wouldn't It Be Good"). White explained to MTV News: "That's actually an obsession of Alex and Liane - they like to use a lot of Scotch tape in everything. But you can only see it when the light's pointing at it, so it just catches the camera really well."
  
  The other video, which is now deemed "official," shows the band performing in front of alternating blue, white, and pink backgrounds. It was directed by Sophie Muller and Stacey Hartly.
• The Ting Tings' two big hits, "That's Not My Name" and "Shut Up And Let Me Go," both deal with annoyance at record labels, so it's probably not a surprise that they didn't last long at Columbia Records. Those two hits were part of their 2008 debut album, We Started Nothing. They had their second album, Sounds From Nowheresville, ready in 2010 but erased it when they decided to go in another musical direction. That album finally appeared in 2012 and was their last on a major label.
  
  And while they didn't get along with record companies, Jules De Martino and Katie White did stay together as a couple, something most musical duos find difficult (ask Eurythmics or The White Stripes).
  
  Regarding the song's cultural impact and the state of the music industry, De Martino told Songfacts in 2025: "We're very passionate about our songwriting and have been writing together for over 20 years. Everything we write is great yet only time shows how true and meaningful or relevant it is on culture. You can't knowingly create culture or something cultural. If you're second guessing that, you're done, and it's kind of what has happened to the music industry! It's done. Cooked."
• The song took on a second life in 2022 because of the "That's Not My Name" TikTok meme. It involves users listing all the nicknames and mispronunciations that others have derived from their actual names while the Ting Tings hit plays in the background. Some participants are actors, film stars and musicians who put their own spin on the trend by listing the highlights of their resumé.
• "That's Not My Name" soundtracks a 2025 Starbucks commercial where the baristas write motivational messages on the cups instead of trying to spell the names of the customers, which they often get wrong.
• TikTok has been good to this song and to The Ting Tings. "TikTok is a platform we love," Katie White told Songfacts. "It feels like we get a free roll of the dice here. As independent artists it's not governed or owned by majors. Unlike Spotify, etcetera, you don't have to pay your way through. You genuinely can get discovered here. In fact our new single from the new album has had over 1.3 million videos created using our new music and has reached a 2 billion audience. And it provides a better royalty rate than Spotify. It's exciting."
• The 2024 Bruno Mars and Rosé collaboration "APT." has some musical similarities to "That's Not My Name." It's a little too similar for The Ting Tings. "We plan to have a word with Bruno Mars," Jules De Martino told Songfacts. "That felt a bit too close for comfort. Of course we are proud to hear our music style drop into new creations and like we were inspired we hope to inspire others but I wasn't a fan of how close this felt."