20YAT #13 White Town – Women In Technology
UK album chart peak: #83
The role the radio enjoys in occasionally bumping complete unknowns up the charts was long-established by the late 90s. But if any evidence were needed of the influence that Radio 1’s indie end in particular held over the pop charts by the start of 1997, White Town is the smoking gun: Jyoti Mishra was catapulted from bedroom dabbler to chart topper in January 1997 thanks to the patronage of Mark and Lard’s Graveyard Shift programme, and his intriguingly wonderful single Your Woman remains one of the great British one-hit wonders.
The album that aimed to capitalise on Your Woman’s stratospheric success, though, suggests that Mishra had no interest in making his new home a permanent one: while there are several endearing melodies on Women In Technology, and plenty of quirk, nothing even attempts to reproduce the beautifully grainy, idiosyncratically outsider slink that made Your Woman such a hit. Mishra’s authenticity in that regard is admirable, and his long career before and after achieving a number-one single in eight countries is testament to that.
Even twenty years later, though, there lingers the tantalising thought of what might’ve happened if he’d tried to write just one more pop song as complete as Your Woman. Indeed, the opening and closing tracks here hint, however diaphanously, that Mishra himself at least considered the possibility, but preferred to take his pop with less polish than the charts would demand. Instead, Women In Technology is an album of ghosts and approximations, with songs either left unadorned and almost bleakly simply like White Town, or become exercises in pastiche like deliberately corny (and slightly heavy-handed in its satire) Theme For An Early Evening American Sitcom.
On 6 February 1997, the week after Your Woman went to number one in the UK, Mark and Lard presented the last-ever Graveyard Shift before the pair moved to the Radio 1 breakfast show. Their playlist that night resembled a sort of Desert Island Discs, opening with Led Zeppelin and the Ramones and closing with Tindersticks in session and a vintage Oasis b-side. Among the golden oldies, though, was Undressed, the second single from Women In Technology and one of only a handful of then-current songs on the running order. Surrounded by so much nostalgia, it stuck out that evening as an oddly retro-futuristic curio, much as the album did a few weeks later against a backdrop of late-period, TFI Friday landfill Britpop.
Now, unexpectedly, large parts of Women In Technology feel thrillingly contemporary, due as much to 2017’s own retromania as Mishra’s uncanny foreshadowing: one can easily imagine a song like Undressed, for example, if given a vocal makeover, being a perfectly natural vehicle for any number of current pop stars. Not that Mishra, one suspects, would ever countenance such an idea: as an adorably generous performance of Your Woman at the Indietracks festival a in 2012 suggested, the music on Women In Technology, despite the huge popularity of part of it, was never really made for mass production.
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Also out this week:
James – Whiplash (Fontana). Chart peak #9
Elliott Smith – Either/Or (Kill Rock Stars). Did not chart
The Orb – Orblivion (Island). Chart peak #19
