‘Why Is Your Band Called White Town?’: Indie Pop, Dialectical Materialism, and Straight Edge

Jyoti Mishra founded the band White Town, which soon turned into a one-man project, in 1989. The song “Your Woman” become a number one hit in the UK in 1997. Jyoti has been straight edge for 30 years.

Gabriel Kuhn talked to him for our straight edge interview series that appeared in a printed form along DIY Conspiracy Vol.10 compilation tape in October 2021.

Jyoti, I’ve edited two books on straight edge and radical politics, and you’re in neither of them. My only excuse is that I did not find out about you being straight edge until recently. Can you forgive me?

Haha—of course I can since I’m surprised you’re interviewing me now! And, ironically, it’s probably because liminal, diasporic identities like mine are, by definition, never in the centre of anything. I’ve never ever been interviewed as an Indian pop musician as my music is too Western. I’ve never had an interview as a queer musician though my songs have dealt explicitly with gender since the start. Similarly, I’ve never been in hardcore punk bands, though I do feel White Town was a punk band when we started, not sounding a million miles from what Title Fight did on Floral Green.

There are also a lot of edge gatekeepers who feel the term should be reserved only for people in or around hardcore punk. They will be outraged by me even daring to call myself edge. They believe that, if you’re not making hardcore, you have to call yourself ‘teetotal’ or ‘poison-free’ instead. I would counter that if you consciously agree with the precepts of straight edge and know Ian MacKaye’s shoe size when he was nineteen, then you have every right to identify as edge. Anyway, fuck gatekeepers—that’s such a shitty crypto-cop personality trait.

How did you come to straight edge? You are known as an indie artist, not a hardcore dude.

Well, I started drinking when I was at school, around the age of thirteen or so. For my generation in Britain, that was fairly normal. I had a very fun time drunk on my own and battered with my mates, financed from pocket money and petty theft. But when I left school at sixteen in 1982, went on the dole and joined my first ever band, my money was way tighter. Apart from travel and other outgoings, I wanted to buy records and new music gear. It was just too expensive to drink. So, I first gave up on alcohol because I didn’t want to literally piss my money away.

The other big thing is that I joined The Militant Tendency at seventeen, which was/is a Marxist revolutionary party, orthodox Trotskyist. This hardened my existing atheism into dialectical materialism, which definitely affected how I viewed psychoactives. Some drug users see their drugs as being gateways to other dimensions. I see them as causing some form of neural dysfunction.

By the time I was twenty, I had a little bit more money, so I could have started drinking again. But I didn’t. I’d been gigging and clubbing and going to parties staying totally sober for years and now… I found the concept of paying out money to blind yourself weird. And that was alcohol, forget anything like dope or coke as I’d met many more musicians by now and I found stoners and cokeheads hugely fucking irritating. The first group were apathetic and hippyish, the second yuppie Thatcherite scum (this being the ‘80s, there were a lot of musicians around like that).

I didn’t actually hear about “straight edge” the movement till waaaay later. Maybe ’92? 93? As soon as I heard the term, it seemed to fit because it was a philosophical stance, a statement about non-consumption as a radical act when so much of alternative culture is “Buy this and you’re cool”. It was also a much shorter way of saying, “No thanks, I don’t drink alcohol or do drugs. Yes, cannabis is a drug even though it’s natural. No, I’m not a Muslim, it’s a lifestyle choice not religious.” As a brown man, people will far more likely assume your abstinence is based on a religious foible than a personal conviction.

This was probably my most annoying time as an abstainer. I remember being so vehemently anti-smoking that I had a huge fallout with a friend when she took it up. She couldn’t believe how upset I was. Looking back, I was a dick about it, I was one of those classic, annoying, preachy edge kids.

Much, much later, around ’98 I met some lovely edge people when I lived in Norwich, went to actual, small hardcore edge gigs and loved it all. The positivity, the inclusivity. Everyone having so much fun and all sober! This would be the first time I got X-ed up and I remember feeling like a bit of a fake, though I’d been drug-free for over a decade and a half. But a couple of times, in clubs, people would come up and reveal they were edge (or, much more likely, had been) and I could see the value in wearing “the badge”.

I feel kinda bad for bringing it up, but you’re also known as a “one-hit wonder”. Has that been a burden?

Oh god, not at all! It’s a gift, if anything. The usual thing I’ll say is, “Better a one-hit wonder than a no-hit wonder”, and although that does sounds very glib, it’s sadly true. Out of all the people who become musicians, maybe 1% will go on to form actual bands and make original music. Out of that one percent, 99% never make any impact artistically, no-one ever knows about them or sings along with their songs.

So, you can see that I actually feel very lucky to have any success at all, particularly because it was pure me, recorded in my spare bedroom. No autotune, no major labels, no blah blah blaaah.

Okay, this is an even riskier question, but anyone who has watched the film About a Boy will wonder whether you can really live off a number-one hit for the rest of your life. Enlighten us based on first-hand experience: true or false?

Let’s say it’s very up and down. For example, my earnings were hit hard by Covid because, surprise surprise, people don’t listen to Spotify in the morning if they’re at home, they put Netflix on instead. So, I’m lucky in that I do other stuff too, I write for Sound On Sound magazine occasionally and I’m also a photographer.

Basically, when you’re self-employed, you’re always working because… well, there’s no-one there but you.

I promise the questions will become less generic, but for those who do not know: why “White Town”?

Two reasons:

1. I’m Indian. I was born there and we emigrated to Britain when I was three years old, in 1969. I chose the name of the band to represent some of the experiences I had as a kid, growing up brown in predominantly white towns. As you may imagine, it wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs.
2. I was also alluding to this bit I found in a history of Indian architecture: “Around the forts the first signs of segregation were already apparent—the European and Indian communities lived in separate settlements with very distinct characters. In the case of Fort St. George, Madras, the main fortifications surrounded the warehouses and other military buildings, and the so-called ‘white town’ had another ring of fortification separating it from the ‘black town’.”

When “Your Woman” came out, you had a contract with EMI. Looking at interviews you’ve done over the years, it sounds as if your experiences with major labels would make anyone want to join the “DIY conspiracy”. Can you tell us about your experiences with the music industry?

Whatever you do within capitalism, you’re fucked. If you’re on an indie label, you get artistic cred and creative freedom but you don’t get paid so you can’t make a living wage out of what is your job. If you’re on a major label, you get paid (if you have lawyers and accountants on your side) but you don’t get creative freedom. You do get artistic cred as the label just buys that for you from the relevant people on the hip websites.

Having said that…

As a Marxist entering the belly of the beast, the corporate world, I expected a xenomorph-level ruthlessness about making money, exploiting me and my musical assets until I was left spent at the side of the road like a parboiled jellyfish.

Nope. Major labels are simply terrible at making money. For a start, 9/10 of their acts lose money and they only keep going by cross-charging those accounts to the actual profitable bands. Secondly, every person at a label cares only for their personal fiefdom, not the overall profitability of the label.

Here’s a scenario I’ve been in more than once: you get signed to a label/publisher by one A&R person. Great, they’re ringing you up, trying to do stuff with your music, bigging you up with the team where they are. Because any success you have reflects well on them and their choice of you to sign.

A year or so later, you get a message from the A&R, they can’t help you with stuff anymore as they’re moving to another label but here’s your new A&R, they’re great, congrats and goodbye.

Your new A&R doesn’t give a shit about you or your success. Why? Because they didn’t sign you. In fact, they’ll probably let you languish and divert opportunities away from you, funnelling those to bands they did sign who will make them look good. Multiply this by every person at a company and I think that gives you a fairly accurate picture of why major labels are so shite at making money and also why no bands have longevity.

It’s no accident that Depeche Mode are still touring as a non-nostalgia act and they were on Mute. All their contemporaries that were on Virgin or EMI or other majors got sidelined and then dropped. Music companies are just sausage factories and bands are sausage meat. There’s always more eager, fresh, naïve meat for the grinder.

How do you release your music and book your shows today?

All totally DIY. I make the music, I master it and do the graphics and make the vids as well.

I’m very selective on gigs as I won’t want to end up in front of a crowd of people who just want to hear “Your Woman” fifteen times.

Also, I will not work with Tories, I much prefer gigging for co-ops / anarchists / communists and I want shows to be all ages with good accessibility for everyone. As you may expect, this kind of narrows down the gigs I do, as I turn around 90% down. My ideal tour would be me and my MPC and guitar just doing a load of gigs in small rooms to maybe thirty or forty people. I have zero desire to do the large rock band thing of squinting out from a high stage at a bunch of people you can’t see.

You’ve talked about X-ing up, and video footage reveals that you do it for your gigs. As you rarely play for a hardcore audience, what are the reactions? Do people know what it means? Are they confused? Do they simply not care?

Well, there’s a huge crossover from the alt/indie pop scene to the punk scene. A lot of the Swedish indie kids I met who were in their late twenties were all teenage straight edge hardcore kids because of Refused. One of them joked that there was a line across the country, above it, every kid loved Refused and was edge, below it every kid loved The Smiths and went round puffing cigs.

So yeah, a lot of people do get it. But I partially X-up so people ask and then I can explain, without proselytizing. This is a very thin line: I don’t want to be saying I have the answer and that I am the light because, euuughh, religion. But I do want to say there’s more than one way to live your life and perhaps look around. I feel that way about straight edge, about communism, about polyamory—find out what’s right for you.

You’ve already mentioned the politics and Trotskyism. How strong was the Trotskyist influence?

I was in an actual revolutionary Trot party. I’m not now but I still believe it’s the only vanguardist movement with the correct theoretical approach. However, having read a lot more syndicalist and anarchist stuff since then, some of that has leached in and I’m a lot more wary now of democratic centralism in the sense that it contains the imago of Stalinism. But without democratic centralism, how do you ever organise a party that’s strong enough to overthrow a ruling class that not only has tanks and jets but also the GCHQ and the NSA?

Also, so much of contemporary politics is identity politics, I feel like Trotskyism has the only real solution, a class solution. When it comes down to it, class overrules all.

Finally, I love this quote and would like to have it on my grave: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” That, to me, is the perfect summation of Marxism. Unlike liberals or a great many anarchists I’ve met, we never blame the victory of Tories on the working class ‘betraying’ labour or other such petty bourgeois bullshit. If the working class votes Tory, it’s precisely because the workers’ parties and their leaders have failed them. That’s who to blame, no-one else. We failed to campaign enough, we failed to get across what socialism is and how capitalism is now inimical to humanity itself.

You mentioned that your politics had an impact on how you saw straight edge. Can you explain that a bit more?

I think everything flows from my atheism, from my deep conversion to philosophical materialism at age seven. I still remember the moment now; I was in the nativity play for Christmas, some bit part, and I remember thinking, “This is all a lie. There’s no God. Nothing. These are just stories and they’re not even good stories, they don’t make any sense.”

Have you ever had a moment that is an absolute, undeniable epiphany? Where something just clicks inside you and tension you had without knowing it evaporates? I felt this tremendous sense of ease in the realisation that I was free and that life was ultimately without any meaning and there was certainly no Angry Old White Man in the sky watching my every move. No ghosts, no goblins, no fairies, no Santa, just material things.

Obviously, you can be materialist and be right-wing but, with me, materialism was what lead me into being myself and fighting for my own right to be different. Mostly this was with racists, so by the time I was sixteen, seventeen, I was a ball of fury just waiting to explode. The perfect recruit to Marxism.

The way I explain it is that since I’m a materialist, there is no heaven, hell, reincarnation. This life is it. If there was a one-time-only showing of my favourite film at a local cinema, I wouldn’t get drunk or high before the showing because I want to experience it as sharply and richly as possible. I don’t want to “take the edge off”, I want to feel everything.

Someone else might say, “Hell yeah, I’d get wasted to fuck.” Which is totally fine by me, you do you. But leave me alone to live how I want to live.

Again, one life, one existence, one chance to experience everything, good and bad. For me, being edge is about rejecting things that guarantee mental states. I had an argument years ago with an old-school punk, he thought punk was basically only about being wasted and that straight edge wasn’t punk. He said that I didn’t get high or drink cos I was afraid to lose control. First, I pointed out that I used to drink way more than he did. Secondly this: when I go out to a gig or a club, I go out sober. I take what the night gives me. It could be a shit night where the sound is terrible and the bands are wankers. Or it could be the most sublime night of my life where I find a new band to obsess over. I’ll take it, good or bad, let’s see what the universe has.

But: average people have to self-medicate with psychoactives simply to have the courage to go out at all, to talk to people, to dance! They are sooo afraid of having a bad time that they pre-alter their neural responses to try to control their feelings. I call that being a control freak.

Your latest album, Fairchild Semiconductor, is the soundtrack to a TV series that doesn’t exist. Can you explain?

Hmm, I think I can’t better the blurb on my Bandcamp page. This is the gist of it: We do not live in a universe where there’s a lavish TV series about the tech company Fairchild Semiconductor that had so much influence on computer history, from developing the first monolithic integrated circuit to guiding us to the moon. But we should and I want to do my utmost to make that universe this one.

Any last words for the hardcore audience frequenting this website about why it actually ain’t that bad to listen to some pop every now and then?

Haha, no way—I’m a middle-aged Indian man making consciously queer, communist pop music. What the fuck have I got to say to some kid who’s just discovered Have Heart or Year Of The Knife? I believe Shakespeare summed it up perfectly when he wrote: “Seventeen without a purpose or direction / We don’t owe anyone a fucking explanation.”

You’ll find Jyoti on Twitter and Instagram, and White Town on Bandcamp. Jyoti’s website is bzangygroink.co.uk.

Source: diyconspiracy.net