Fairweather Friends

For all but the first two or so years of its existence, White Town has been the solo musical project of British-Indian Jyoti Mishra. Born in Rourkela, India in 1966, he and his family migrated to Derby about three years later. The experience of growing up an Indian immigrant in a white town was what inspired the project's name when it formed in 1989 after seeing a Pixies gig in '88. By the autumn of 1990, with members coming and going for a while at that point, Jyoti decided to continue White Town as a solo project, working with indie labels for most of his career.

White Town is most known for his 1997 hit single "Your Woman", which topped the UK Singles charts (reaching a respectable #23 on Billboard's Hot 100). After a brief stint with EMI, releasing the album Women in Technology with them in February of that year off of the success of the single, Jyoti went back to working with indie labels, never tasting chart success ever again (not that he ever wanted to). In the 2020's, there have been two notable "blips" that sparked some reinterest in White Town. The first being in 2020 when Dua Lipa used the same sample of Lew Stone's "My Woman" as Jyoti did in his hit in her song "Love Again", and the second being the release of music reviewer Todd in the Shadows' video about "Your Woman" as part of his One Hit Wonderland series, which has over 250K views as of this writing. Personally, I came from the latter bandwagon.

With Todd's video as my starting point, finding myself interested in both the song and the story of its creator, I embarked on a journey to research as much as I could about White Town and Jyoti's music. This site doubles as both a place to document my findings, as well as a tribute to an ever-underappreciated artist and his songs about, as he himself puts it, "women, sex, death, politics and women".