So Jules, where abouts are you freezing at the mo? We’re in London at the moment, it’s really cold and it’s 10 o’clock at night.

Have you been snowed in? We were but it’s been really pretty on the countryside and I’ve had friends of mine sending me pictures sleigh-riding and stuff. It’s pretty outside but it’s pretty grim in cities when it snows.

It’s kind of hard to believe, sitting in the heat down here… Oh don’t rub it in!

Okay, I’ll give you a shot, have you been following the cricket at all? Oh you know what, we haven’t. Because we’ve been travelling around quite a lot and we’ve been finishing some mixing and stuff like that in London. We’ve been stuck in studios working and doing shows and stuff. The thing with the cricket is that it’s on at a bad time for us, all through the night, so we don’t get any sleep when it finishes at 4am. We get it on now and again but it’s like, if I do that, then it’s the end of my day the next day.

So you’re in Oz soon… How do you get the energy to keep touring? Our experience of Australia is that it has been the best kind of tours we do because they have a really good regime out there because when you travel down – the Big Day Out was like the Big Day Off for us – you get a lot of days off and it kind of caters for the fact that a lot of bands actually travel quite a long way. So that kind of thing is one of the easiest tours to do because we stay there for almost two or three weeks, which is fantastic. When you’re touring, you think it’s so glamorous but you get to a city, you do a gig and you’re trying to get up early the next day and then you’re travelling out so you miss a lot of these beautiful cities. When we’re in Australia we always get time to get around and check out the sites. I can’t grumble, it’s always a pleasure to come to Australia. Everytime we tell our crew we’re going to Australia they’re doing backflips.

The alleged title of the new album is Kuntz. Is that just a complete rumour? It’s not. When we were in Berlin recording – the word kuntz is art in German – there was a massage parlour next to the studio, a seedy one admittedly, and it had a sign in neon lights out the front which said ‘Massage Kuntz’ and we just found it really amusing so we took a picture of it, blew it up and stuck it on the wall of our studio. We sent the picture to our label telling them it was the album title, winding them up, and they went crazy, telling us we can’t call an album that. Then we had an interview with a magazine from the UK that came over to Berlin. They sat in the studio and listened to half the album while we were working on it and they saw the picture on the wall and asked us if it was the title of the album and we said, “no, it’s a working title if anything”. And they took it too literally and took it to press. It went everywhere.

At least it brought attention to the album… Yeah but it wasn’t meant for that and the weird thing about it was that, in fairness, we really love the word and it really writes well. At one point we thought, you know what, we really love this, but when it went to press we were really disappointed. It sort of became as though we were looking for attention. We’re obviously not announcing the title this time!

The Ting Tings play Good Vibrations Festival in Sydney (Feb 12), Melbourne (Feb 13), Gold Coast (Feb 19) and Perth (Feb 20). www.goodvibrationsfestival.com.au