In my last post I promised you something quirky. Is this quirky enough for you? Are you not quirked??
Your Woman, by White Town (his 1st and only #1)
1 week, from 19th – 26th January 1997
A gender-bending tale, centred around a trumpet sample from the 1930s, all written , recorded and produced by a fairly geeky looking chap in his bedroom. And catchy. I should also mention that it’s incredibly catchy.
It’s also very hard to describe. Is it dance, funk, indie, Britpop…? Is it lo-fi, hip-hop… boom bap?? (I have no idea what ‘boom bap’ is – Wikipedia suggested it, and I just liked the sound of it.) It’s at times creepy – the horn sample sounds like a haunted gramophone – but also quite funny – the middle eight with the plinky-plonky Game Boy sound effect is brilliant, my favourite part of the song, but also surely a musical piss-take.
Most of all it’s pretty subversive. Musically so, because number one singles aren’t meant to be recorded by nerds in their bedroom. And lyrically, because it sounds at first like our most explicitly gay chart-topper since ‘Relax’. A clipped, very English-sounding man delivering lines like: Well I guess what you say is true, I could never be the right kind of boy for you, I could never be your woman… The man behind it has said that it’s not explicitly queer though, more just about loving someone who isn’t right for you, when love and lust get mixed with your highbrow ideals…
The man behind White Town being Jyoti Mishra, born in India and raised in Derby, who had been in bands since the late 1980s and was well-known in underground scenes. ‘Your Woman’ was pushed heavily by Radio 1, leading to it entering the charts at the top, but Mishra struggled to follow it up. Having signed with EMI, he felt a loss of creative freedom, as well as frustration at his sudden fame. Frustrating for me is the fact that the follow-up to ‘Your Woman’ managed to scrape to #57, meaning that White Town isn’t strictly a one-hit wonder.
I mentioned above that the trumpet hook came from the ‘30s, more specifically ‘My Woman’, a 1932 hit written by Bing Crosby. (The music video nicely plays with the 1930s theme, aping the pratfalls and scene fades of old silent films.) The version sampled by Mishra is a different version, still from 1932, by Lew Stone & His Monseigneur Band. It’s been used since by rapper Naughty Boy and, probably most famously, by Dua Lipa on her 2020 song ‘Love Again’. It’s also been suggested that the original trumpet riff inspired one of the world’s most famous pieces of film score: the ‘Imperial March’ from Star Wars.
Jyoti Mishra and White Town were quickly dropped by EMI, and went back to recording independently, releasing their most recent album last year. For the 20th anniversary of ‘Your Woman’, he re-recorded the song using instruments commonly used in 1917. Because why not. Back in 1997, the tune was such a smash that it made its way onto ‘Now That’s What I Call Music 36’, which was the first edition of the series I ever bought, on cassette, probably with my 11th birthday money. And I’m not just inventing a cute ending for this post when I say that back then ‘White Town’ was my favourite track across the whole four sides… It really was.
The UK Number Ones Blog 
It’s not bad…again I don’t like those drums (but they are not in your face) but it isn’t bad at all. I could listen to this.
Well, he is the original “do it in your bedroom” breakthrough that all of us non-talented non-musicians secretly wish we could do. Getting ideas in your head is all very well (and mine was to revamp Elvis’ Any Day Now into a mash-up with You Got The Love until Pnau sampled it for the Elvis movie, total obvious smash I thought, but no not even Pnau…) but you need to know how to make it reality. Tch. Your Woman was charming and unusual, still like it, and the retro-20’s throwback sounds worked.