White Town 'Your Woman'

Chart Peak: 1 (1 week)

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White Town is Jyoti Mishra... He hails from Derby and 'Your Woman', with its spanking Al Bowlly sample, raced to No.1 on release in January '97

Officially it was the lead track on the Abort? Retry? Fail? EP, but really a single in its own right, 'Your Woman' is famous as the home-recorded single that got picked up by Mark Radcliffe on Radio 1 and got to Number One. With my aforementioned radio avoidance I don't think I heard this before it charted either and I definitely remember that I didn't like it at the time, but I don't remember why.I know that at the time I was resistant to anything at all reminiscent of 80s synth-pop, and perhaps there's a little too much self-conscious cleverness about the record too.

All of which said, it's grown on me a lot in the years since, and when I acquired Now 36 it was one of the first tracks I ripped and put onto my MP3 player. I'm more impressed now by the mystery of the lyric (Who's singing to whom? Why is an obviously male voice telling us he can't be a woman?) and the sheer number of different musical ideas Mishra manages to squeeze into the track - I especially like the bleepy sounds followed by the crunchy bass and the stumbling finish. It's tempting to see that as some sort of metaphor for his career, but this might not be entirely fair. It's true that the single is a strong candidate for the one-hit-wonder label - the follow-up 'Undressed' managed not to even make the Top 50, whereupon EMI let him go - but Mishra seems happy enough that way now, and this did become one of the bigger British hits in the US of that era, reaching 23 and presumably helping keep the wolf from his door.

My brother was well ahead of me with this song, and he bought the album Women In Technology on cassette when you could still do such a thing (it doesn't even seem to be available on CD any more). I can only remember one other song from it now, though, and it wasn't even the other single. Oh well, it's this song that counts here.

Available on: Violent Veg - 40 Favourite Songs For Dad!