Welly

Crosstown Concerts Presents…

Welly

Welly is an extraordinary character with a remarkable literary way of describing himself, his band and society. A square peg in the round hole of suburban life, Welly embraced his difference from an early age and went onto channel his observations on suburbia into songs. Whip-smart, playful, funny and terrifyingly smart pop songs to be precise. He then set about finding the perfect vehicle to pedal his wares and so formed a band and delivered a debut album bursting with “democratised pop music for people that feel fun in the charts stopped at ‘Love Machine’ by Girls Aloud”. Big in The Suburbs is set for release on March 21st, 2025.

To Welly “The suburbs are a total microorganism of modern British society, the purgatory of class and status, copycat compounds of 5 shops (Co-op, Coral, Age UK, another Co-op, and a chippy that charges or Ketchup), 2 pubs (a bad one, and a really bad one) and 10,000 identical little homes. But the album isn’t as specific as this – you’ll find the songs are about things we all know well – wanting more than we’ve got, insecurity, cold feet, young drunkenness, jealousy, sickly sweet love, regret, uncertainty, and just wanting to fit in. But these tableaux were all born out of those odd places, thousands of which perch under major cities and above the countryside, never knowing its time, but always knowing its place.”

Welly’s songwriting is journalistic, telling the world what he sees out of his window, “I’m just lucky that most of the nation grew up with a similar view out of the window as I had. My songs point the finger but don’t wag it. It’s just going ‘Look! Isn’t this funny everyone?’ over a disco-punk beat.” Big In The Suburbs magnifies the mundane with humour. “When you look at life through a microscope, as suburbanites often must, sometimes a speck of dust can be mistaken for nuclear warfare.”

Welly writes and arranges everything himself with the unwavering faith of this mystery gang of bandmates: Jacob and Joe on bass and guitar, friends since school and are Welly’s most tolerant allies, keeping him in check. Matt (guitar) and Hanna (keys, Grade 1 cowbell) from the Netherlands met Welly at University in Brighton and thus completed the gang.“The best analogy for our relationship is that of‘Scooby-Doo’ – the show is named after the main character, but there’s a whole gang involved that are just as memorable.”

In terms of Welly’s musical inspirations – these are compartmentalised into 5 distinct sub-genres, as the man himself explains:

➢ The School of Suburban Songwriting: “There’s a clear family tree, a lineage that I want to be the heir to – Ray Davies in The Kinks, Terry Hall from The Specials, Suggs and Mike from Madness, Paul Weller from The Jam, Ian Dury, Damon from Blur and Jarvis from Pulp, Turner from Arctic Monkeys – the line of succession ends there. We need a new provincial Prince!”

➢ Pop Perfection: “Madonna, KLF, Bjork, Lady Gaga, Pet Shop Boys, Pete Waterman, and Quincy Jones. Masterminds of pop perfection, knowing what the public wants, the slick, easy-to-digest packaging, concealing intelligent, murderous melodies.”

➢ House, Disco and Funk: “Daft Punk, T-Coy, Orbital, Grace Jones, Don Carlos, Mousse T., Metro Area, LCD Soundsystem, Mike Pickering, Fatboy Slim, Sade. Lessons in minimalism and good drums. Just find one killer bassline and play it for 15 f***ing minutes.”

➢ Indie Dancefloor Fillers: “It’s all about the intro, it’s all about the verse to chorus ratios, 3-minute golden holy grails. The Clash’s ‘Casbah’, anything by Franz Ferdinand, Blur’s Girls and Boys, New Order, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Kaiser Chiefs, even Wet Leg now.”

➢ The Heartfelt, The Bookish: “The Divine Comedy, Belle and Sebastian, The Last Dinner Party, Everything But The Girl, Billy Joel, Talk Talk, The Beautiful South, Neil Diamond, Dusty Springfield.”

Yet, music wasn’t always Welly’s forte, up to the age of 13 he didn’t like music, or sound really. “I only liked the sounds trains made, or the theme tunes to ‘Bangers and Mash’ (Chas and Dave composed!), ‘Fireman Sam’ (sounds like Manic Street Preachers), ‘Postman Pat’ (can I call it English folk?), and later Horrid Henry (basically Franz Ferdinand).” When Welly was 5 his dad gave him an iPod Shuffle with 300 songs. That, along with driving to school with his mum, gave Welly a list of about 6 songs that he liked until he was a teenager. These were; Squeeze – ‘Up The Junction’, Take That – ‘Shine’, Mika – ‘Big Girls You Are Beautiful’, The Kinks – ‘All Day and All of the Night’, The Ting-Tings – ‘Great DJ’ and Jocelyn Brown – ‘Somebody Else’s Guy’.”

And so it remained, until about 2014, when he went to stay with his Dad in Brighton. “I told him that I don’t really like music. Disgraced, he sat me in the kitchen, put on the music video for ‘Common People’ on his laptop and left the room… hmm. This bloke is singing about the supermarket. That’s cool. I thought music was just about ‘ooh baby’ and blowing someone’s whistle. And now it’s ten years later.”

Welly’s literary inspirations are highlighted in the album track ‘Under Milk Wood’. We hear an excerpt from Dylan Thomas’ 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood, performed by Welly’s Dad – He doesn’t know hes on the album. Other literary heroes include Iris Hanif Kureshi’, Evelyn Waugh, Murdoch, Alan Beckett, Carol Ann Duffy, Edward Lear, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and John Betjeman, “my hero, ever wanting to be in a trenchcoat, commenting on oak leaves falling in a concrete park”.

A Welly gig is where it comes together. “I want our gigs, my music, to be transformative like you’ve gone to see a play, a sitcom, that we’re characters that landed on this stage, you get to join us in our pop dystopia for an hour, not suffering sweaty obnoxious blokes with guitars and greasy hair constantly asking you if you’re ‘…having a good time!?’. It’s over.”

“I want music to uplift me and make me feel cool and collected, I want Etta James, Dusty, Neil Tennant, mascots of cool. I take my inspiration from the 80s in that way – the threat of Nuclear War, Miners’ Strike, Privatisation, crap Government – what did pop do? Wake Up Before You Go-Go, Relax, 500 Miles, Don’t

You Want Me Baby, Girls on Film, Top of The Pops, almost LAUGHABLY dancing whilst hell opened up! Where is that now, when we need it most? I want to do that, perhaps less obnoxiously, still aware of the real world, but just have FUN! Christ!!! Isn’t music supposed to be fun?”

From a live album made in a Village Hall for his dissertation to playing The Great Escape 2023 (having already played about 50 shows in Brighton by this point), the DIY element of this ingenious project is definitely something they embrace and has been part of their success so far and something Welly is happy to endorse.

“I think making the DIY, rough-around-the-edges approach obvious is important as it’ll hopefully mean more people take up starting bands again. I want to be glam and flash, but I’ll do it in a few albums, as you can’t fake the crappy indie thing when you’re signed and live in Shoreditch. Posh don’t come out in the wash. Bands are so fun to be in but aren’t cost-efficient, so they’ve fallen out of favour in the mid-level of the music industry from what I can tell. That’s why I love doing pop on a budget. It’s just the best I can afford.”

Before Welly embarked on his journey towards pop stardom, he turned his hand to a megamix of jobs, from a paper round to working as a delivery boy, at Peppa Peppa Pig World, junior Sommelier at a hotel, Pound Land, and now working on a mobile horsebox veg stall for 10 hours a day, humping sacks of potatoes and flirting with bored housewives. But things appear to be changing for Welly and his band of brothers and sisters all doing it for the love, laugh, life. It’s now evolving into a life where he gets to heckle audiences all over the country, get sweaty with dance fever in dingy (and increasingly not-so-dingy) venues, blasting out his idiosyncratic but relatable tales of existence, and share his pin-point commentary on normal, every day life, all wrapped up in a duvet of familiarity and fun making you feel part of his tales and most importantly, part of the gang. Just like all the very best pop music has the power to do.

Big In The Suburbs, the debut album is out on March 21st, 2025.