CHAPTER 78

 

 

#23: WHITE TOWN

“Your Woman”

Single released: January 1997

 

 

“Potter announced he would start the series in a bleak suburban bedroom with a man bursting into early morning song. He would be miming to a fuzzy 78 and the record was by a woman. He told me the song and I said there were good versions of men singing it. NO, he said, I want the audience to be as disoriented as possible.”

(Kenith Trodd, from his notes for the 1990 CD reissue of the Pennies From Heaven soundtrack)

 

“Something in Italy/Is keeping us all alive.”

(Scritti Politti, “Skank Bloc Bologna”)

 

Some records cannot escape their association with time and place. Thus when I think of White Town I think of a white town, or a white countryside within a town; specifically, walking through Christ Church Meadow in Oxford on the first Friday morning of 1997. It was not a sunny day, but the frost had frozen everywhere and its sheet of whiteness had made the world luminous. The place was deserted; the student population still absent, just about recovering from their hangovers. You could have skated under Magdalen Bridge if it had taken your fancy. But the luminosity was glorious; a haven of a barely buried incipient spring, a world private and untouchable. When I emerged into St Clements I did not quite feel of this earth.

 

The record inescapable on the radio at the time was “Your Woman”; an indie single seemingly from nowhere (or, as it turned out, Derby) received, grasped and played in the first instance on Radio 1 by Mark Radcliffe, which then rapidly spread to become potentially the next “O Superman,” a seemingly unchartable leftfield record which had suddenly, but with surprising naturalness, become popular. When first I heard it I assumed that it was the new single by Space, the Liverpudlian post-Britpop group whose useful hits (“Neighbourhood,” “Female Of The Species,” “The Ballad Of Tom Jones” etc.) were the real antecedents to the Kaiser Chiefs and Hard-Fis of the following decade; but there was something else, something unscheduled, going on. And what in any case would Space be doing sampling Al Bowlly?

 

Of course it was the Al Bowlly sample which captured me. It is a sped-up sample of the opening trumpet and reed figures to the recording of the song “Your Woman” with Lew Stone and his Monseigneur Band, cut in Chelsea nine days before my mother was born (29 November 1932) and eventually used in Pennies From Heaven, that epic, seedy meditation on the fatal distance between the warm lies of popular song and the cold truth of everyday life. The arrangement is downbeat and grim, over which Bowlly enters with a gargantuan gust of a world-weary sigh to lament his love for his woman who cheats on him, makes fun of him, lies to him…but still he loves her. If that subject matter sounds familiar, then consider Stevie Wonder’s “I Don’t Know Why I Love You” from twenty-seven years later, and then venture forward a further twenty-one years to the version of that latter song recorded by Green Gartside with the B.E.F. for their Music Of Quality And Distinction Vol 2 project; he transplants the naked passion of Stevie’s confusion and transposes it into the upright, polite but secretly sneaky heart of Bowlly.

 

Jyoti Mishra, the man behind White Town, more or less squares the circle with “Your Woman.” It is the missing link between thirties danceband emotional ambiguity and New Pop stylistic reshuffling; it is no accident that Mishra’s vocal is sonically very close to Trevor Horn, not to mention the Dave Edmunds of “I Hear You Knocking” – as with the latter, “Your Woman” sounds like the first broadcast following a terrible apocalypse, a tentative resurfacing of an old spirit…

 

…or the start of something genuinely new. It is impossible for me not to have a profound degree of affection towards “Your Woman,” not just because it is the next in the unfolding series of visionary number ones by British-based Asian artists, but also because the premature online DIY music man and pre-emptive blogger Mishra was the first one of “us” to make it – apart from some guitar overdubs by his mate Rob Fleay, it is more or less the first number one of the internet age, a production unimaginable even two years previously (although Mishra had already been putting out his music in varying forms for six years by then) – and it opened the floodgates for everyone else, effectively, even (or especially) those of us who sought to write; ask Robin Carmody, for instance, about the importance of White Town to and for him.

 

It is a superbly perambulating post-New Pop record, Mishra provocatively singing the song from the point of view of the female who doesn’t know why “he” doesn’t know why he loves her; caught out with another, he is systematically derided (“So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways”) but in a manner much more regretful than bitter, such that she questions her own initial attraction to him (“Now I think I finally understand/Is it in your genes? I don’t know/But we’ll soon find out – that’s for sure”). The emotional upshot, and the chorus itself, are purposely ambiguous emotionally: “Well I guess what you say is true/I could never be the right kind of girl for you/I could never be your woman.” The sadness, the burden, epitomised by the closing, funereal 16 rpm “My Woman” sample, drags the song down to an exceptionally morose end.

 

But the record itself is the beginning of a new time; I can imagine John Leyton in a parallel 1961 being given the song by Meek to sing, and even if Meek had survived into the Portastudio/ProTools age he may not have sounded much different and certainly no less visionary. His work done, Mishra released a major label album, Women In Technology, a smart and supple Brit equivalent of the Magnetic Fields filtered through the lyrical thrust of the Au Pairs which sold disappointingly, and then retreated into his world of strictly indie, and eventually online-only, musings of and on music where he has remained to this day. Though musically far more conservative than “O Superman,” philosophically it is, in its sublime Peak District way, as radical even as it glances back and acknowledges the original British pop music (and also the most important singer in the history British pop music – why Bowlly? Because, put very simply, he never sounded as though he needed to try in order to express and convey emotion; you can tell from the very breaths which he takes between lines that he’s thinking ahead, anticipating the listener’s reaction, setting us up for the climax, or the comedown, or the euphoria. He has an authority which never masquerades underneath the cloak of bombast. He is spotless, even when the song demands that he be ecstatic or destroyed); it stands as nobly alone as “Telstar” and “God Save The Queen” did before it, and all of us with an interest, vested or otherwise, in promulgating the cause of music on the World Wide Web, owe him. And for that Friday morning in frosty Oxford. And for what the internet and music eventually did for a couple of people whom I could mention.