In no particular order some of my favourite music moments. No34 Your Woman by White Town.
Perhaps one of the unlikeliest UK No1s in musical history, Your Woman by White Town is the very definition of a one hit wonder.
Though released on a major label, it had relatively little promotion and seemed to spread largely through word of mouth.
Quite an achievement considering that this was1997, way before the full impact of the social media revolution.
Part of the record’s mystique lay in the anonymity of the one man band behind the record, Derby-based musician, Jyoti Mishra.
Mishra did not appear in the video or on the cover of the record and remained steadfastly out of the limelight for the majority of his 15 minutes of fame.
I was working in Derby at the time and there were plenty of apocryphal tales of Asian blokes hitting the clubs and passing themselves off as Jyoti in the hope of gaining access to the VIP area.
In reality Mishra was not a complete unknown and had played support shows with the likes of Primal Scream.
If you really want to know what he looks like you can see him playing an acoustic version of Your Woman at the 2011 Indietracks Festival on this link.
Praised by Magnetic Fields frontman Stephen Merritt, the single itself is a witty, atmospheric song, skilfully built around a trumpet sample from band leader Al Bowly‘s My Woman.
Sung by a man from a woman’s perspective, with lyrics referencing Marxism, it’s also pretty subversive for a pop single.
Mishra never really troubled the charts again, but has continued to make music and was advertising a new single on his website as recently as March 2017.
As the man himself says, being a one-hit wonder is better than being a no-hit wonder.
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