White
Town - Another
Lover EP
Jyoti Mishra
We proudly display
THE FACE behind White Town!
In
July 1996 Parasol Records released the then latest missive
from our UK based friend Jyoti Mishra
who recorded under the moniker White Town. Up to that point
we had issued three White Town 7" singles and the full-length
CD Socialism, Sexism, & Sexuality. All were well
received in our own little indie-pop domain, but the rest
of the world didn’t notice or care. When Jyoti delivered
the four-song Abort, Retry, Fail CD-EP we pressed
up our 1,000 copies and figured we had released another great
little CD that no one would hear. Ok, we were wrong. BBC
DJ Mark Radcliffe heard the opening cut "Your Woman" and
in November 1996 he played it for the rest of England. All
of a sudden Parasol was ill prepared to supply the UK with
400,000 White Town singles.
Though
I can probably still find an airing of "Your Woman" at least once a day in
every town with a HITS radio station, White Town’s stay
in the whirlwind romantic world of high stakes music business
was brief. I don’t think Jyoti wanted to be there anyway.
And so we introduce the latest four-song CD-EP from White
Town. No, we don’t expect history to repeat. It shouldn’t
take four months for everyone to catch on…
Here’s
what Jyoti Mishra says about the songs on the new White
Town single…
"Another
Lover"
This is the song I wrote about getting married. It's also partly about going
out to nightclubs and meeting weird Tory women who all assumed I wanted
to shag them, despite me being happily married. Superficially attractive
women become hideously ugly when you find out what's in their nutsoid right-wing
brains. Sonically, it's the kind of whining limey fag disco that I feel
is my prime strength musically.
"Theme
For Leaving Derby"
Ummm. Pretty obvious one, this. Just a short instrumental that I wrote as a
bittersweet summation of my moving house. I've lived in Derby since '77
and it's the closest I've had to a hometown in my regrettably peripatetic
life. The musical style is partly a homage to Erik Satie melodically and
definitely Kraftwerk synthily.
"Theme
For A Violent Videogame"
Again, hardly cryptically titled. This was written with a specific game in
mind, which I can't reveal cos they'd sue my arse. I think that videogame
music is the contemporary form of the Easy Listening stuff that's become
trendy in certain quarters. As such, it was quite fun writing something
that has to have a kitschy element but also had to have some teenage male
bravado. With a ridiculously corny middle bit.
"I
Ain't Commercial"
Well, this is just my pissed-offness put into a song. During the time I was
with EMI, I stopped writing cos I kept hearing those scaly A&R voices
in my head. They're hard to ignore when you've just had a big hit and the
company wants to start the conveyor belt of pop. Writing this song was
purely for me. It's stupid, overlong, out-of-tune, terribly played and
badly sung. Exactly the same as "Your Woman" was in fact. Mind
you, that song didn't have the worst organ solo ever on it and a baby squealing "Oh
Yeah!". This one has. | 
