Welly

Following their recent headline stint on the sold-out Dork Hype List tour, Welly have announced their Seaside Tour for April and May. Travelling across the UK, it accompanies their forthcoming debut album, Big In The Suburbs, which is being released Fri 21 March.

The album centres on the monochrome mundanity and unsung beauty of the suburbs, offering a collection of picture-perfect, alt-pop vignettes in which regular lives are often quietly on the brink of going berserk. For his debut album (all written and self-produced by Welly himself) this rich tableau of British life is celebrated for all its triumphs and tragedies. These are songs about wanting more than you have, about a world in flux, about doomed romance and figuring out how to be happy where everybody knows your name.

Welly (Elliot Hall, to his mum) has been building his creative province with a series of releases in the run up to the album. First single Shopping pays tribute to the dying UK high street and today’s grass-is-greener mentality, setting out the group’s blueprint for pop on a budget. Soak Up The Culture meanwhile sends up and adds to the canon of the lads-on-tour anthem, with lawnmower-themed love triangle Deere John connecting a story arc with Cul-De-Sac which documents the stasis of two people at a romantic dead-end road.  

Welly’s own suburban story has quickly become the stuff of urban myth. The group’s front man, songwriter and producer was born in Southampton, showing an early fascination for other people and how they live their lives through the writings of John Betjeman and Alan Bennett. As a child Welly was obsessed by the same six songs on the iPod Shuffle his Dad clipped to his school trousers every day and that was quite enough. But when his Dad sat him down to watch the video for Pulp’s Common People in 2014, an obsession with music was born.  

Welly’s tales of the extraordinary and the most ordinary lives began between jobs ranging from a paper round to Poundland and Peppa Pig World – and that’s just the Ps – and they now find themselves rallying an energetic audience around the UK likewise in search of something different and something fun, with Big In The Suburbs creating a small-town big-dreams world of its own.

With the album about to drop and a tour of iconic British seaside towns coming soon, we spoke to Welly about life as a perfect-indie DIY pop-star.

I LOVE Big In The Suburbs – to the extent I haven’t even worked out which song is my favourite. How quickly did you write it all? The album has an unwavering sense of urgency.

Thanks! I wrote it between November 2020 and July 2024 but the songs themselves are very instinctual. The best ones come fastest. In fact, Soak Up The Culture and Family Photos were written on the same day, as were Under Milk Wood and Life Is A Motorway. There were probably about 60 songs I rotated through, subbing out duds for hits as I got better at writing.

What were your musical influences as a kid? Judging by the band’s sound, there’s elements of XTC, Talking Heads, The Clash, Pulp and Cornershop. Did you always set out to create a sound which was both punky and polyrhythmic? What were your inspirations growing up?

I love the challenge of writing very rich pop songs, but orchestrating them with simple, charity shop instruments. This comes from a love of the pop classics (everything from ABBA to Bjork, Stock Aitken and Waterman to Charli XCX), but a total lack of budget. Hence the broken guitars, the Facebook Marketplace drum machine, all recorded on my college computer.

Your song lyrics have elements of everything from the social realism of The Jam and Artic Monkeys, through to the whimsical delights of Half Man, Half Biscuit. Why is it that it’s so difficult to define exactly what Britishness is, unless it’s through the medium of music, poetry or literature?

I don’t think it’s difficult per se – but often people get lost in the idea that Britain is all fish and chips, cups of tea, red phone boxes. That’s not good enough, really. Britishness is far, far more than that – it’s a sensibility, and outlook. I focus on the characters and the scenery, rather than the stage props.

You’ve managed to perfectly encapsulate small-town parochial oddness in your songs. Is this all based in lived experience? Or are you just fascinated by suburban life?

Absolutely – I left home for university in 2019, and soon realised I was homesick for this place I so yearned to leave my whole life. I think cities are often faceless, unintimate and dull – unlike the colourful, cutesy, idiosyncrasies of suburban life. I missed it. And my Mum’s lasagne.

Who does the styling in your videos? You’re like a cult or a really cool gang we’d want to be in. Are you actually a gang? I don’t want to commit any crimes, if that’s OK …

I do! Trying to rip off Madness. I love how each of them seem like a character in their own right. But it’s slightly backfired, because now we have a load of fan pages that delight in warping these images to their will.  

Is it time for another wave of Cool Britania, or did hype ruin Brit-Pop? Are some things better left in the past?

Well, I didn’t live through it, but I’d say the hype is certainly still with us. I think genres are largely obsolete now. People just want good songs. Even the album is dropping behind. People want good songs to get them through a bus journey or the walk to school. It’s sad in a way, but it means the good stuff rises to the top.  

You’re all living in Brighton now. How’s the Sussex life treating you? Have you started saying ‘bin’ instead of ‘been’ and feeling uncontrollable urges to burn stuff on November the 5^th?

Haha! I love Sussex. I work for a greengrocer here, which sends me all through the downs, the Weald, the coast … I think I’ll settle here one day. But for now, I live up a hill on the outskirts of Brighton, in a house held together by mould.

It feels like it could be a huge year for Welly. What does the summer have in store? Any festivals?

As well as playing the seaside tour in April (and have some fantastic B&Bs booked) and so far we can confirm we’re playing TRNSMT, Wilderness, The Great Escape, but there’s many more …

Welly play in-stores at Brighton’s Resident Records on Fri 21 and London’s Rough Trade East Sun 23 March. Their Seaside tour calls in at Worthing’s Charles Dickens on Fri 18 April, with festival dates coming in the summer. Their album, Big In The Suburbs, is released on Fri 21 March 2025.

www.worldwidewelly.com  

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