Welly @ the Bodega

Welly was back at Nottingham’s The Bodega for the second time this year. His self-deprecation is an extremely humble act, because there is no way that what Welly is experiencing right now is anything but a comeuppance. Having released their debut album “Big in the Suburbs” in March this year, the band is surrounded by an air of excitement and budding recognition. “They say you play the Bodega twice –once on the way up and... nice to see you again”, Welly quipped. The Mic's Aaliyah Field reports.

The Original Cover of Big In The Suburbs

Openers, Your Mate’s Ex and Vincent’s Last Summer, kicked off a music lover’s evening by representing two points on the alt-pop spectrum. Charli xcx style vocals with an 80’s synth beat followed by The Dare with more rock influence and AC/DC adlib vocals. Welly’s band danced beside me in lieu of it being Your Mate’s Ex’s last show on the tour. It was clear then that their calibre for bringing the energy is not exclusive to the stage. 

By the time it hit 9:30 the crowd was reeling from the openers who displayed immense stamina. If a band with any less of a reputation for extreme vitality was due to hit the stage after Vincent’s Last Summer, I’d be worried they’d been done a comparative disservice. Welly, however, could handle it, and need not be afraid to showcase brilliant acts as their openers. 

Welly’s entrance, scored by the “Macarena” no less, set the standard for the tongue-in-cheek tracks to follow. They began with their album’s opening track Big In The Suburbs, of which it seemed every audience member knew every word. If you didn’t know the words, not to worry! Welly makes it incredibly easy to involve yourself with guided chants and catchy lyrics.

High energy was a constant. Band members took turns jumping off the stage, bouncing off each other, feeding off the kinetic energy of the crowd. There were bassists in the pit, keyboardists with cowbells, singers with bubble guns, and a whole lot of entranced concert goers. It’s Not Like this in France saw a test of the architectural integrity of the Bodega’s second floor. Everyone in that room was part of the same entity, moving like viscous liquid around each other and maintaining the consistent beating heart of Welly’s tracks with their feet. The ground level changed as an estimated four hundred Doc Martens and Asics trainers hit the floor in unison, guided by the track’s heavy drumbeat. Welly performs with a palpable passion for music and a certain je ne sais quoi that is incredibly entertaining to watch.

Those in the bar downstairs may have understandably mistaken Welly for a comic with a heavy musical element in his routine. “The next one is really good to gallop to, great galloping tempo” Welly teased, before playing The Roundabout Racehorse. The set was full of quips and good-natured audience interaction. It was truly reminiscent of good old fashioned English humour with the three main elements accounted for: self-deprecation, deadpan delivery, and obscure references. 

The end of The Roundabout Racehorse where Welly repeats “I’ve got to get out, I can’t, I can’t” is a rare moment of serious reflection among the unadulterated fun. Welly’s vocals here were a desperate plea for a way out of the suffocating suburbs. This was the only time in the set that the energy blatantly shifted away from carefree to an introspective look into the theme of the album. On one hand, the suburbs are nostalgic and comfortable but on the other, they are isolating and difficult to escape. How do you leave somewhere that underpins your entire identity?

At a Welly show you are part of the music. The level of energy they supply to their audience is impossible to contain. Each song brings the audience closer to boiling point. By about mid-set, the audience are gaseous molecules weightlessly bouncing around the room, their path dictated by the rhythm of Cul-de-Sac.

Later, Welly had left the stage to fake out the audience, leaving the room to vibrate in anticipation as they still hadn’t played their much-loved 2022 single, Me and Your Mates. The potential in the room didn’t falter for a second. When they did make their return, the great finale involved every touring musician in the room on stage and no prop left unused. A swarm of bubbles and rainbow lights adorned the sunglasses wearing bands as they strummed guitars and bopped along to the hit. Members of the crowd who attempted to remain reserved throughout the set were now convinced to jump along and reach through bubbles in solidarity with their fellow Welly fans. Bassist, Jacob Whitear, leapt in and out of the mosh, tripping people up with his wired microphone. It was of little inconvenience as most people’s feet barely made contact with the ground anyway. 

Welly has a fantastic talent for commanding a crowd with their genuine interactions and stage presence. Their music is made for an unforgettable live experience that would satisfy even the fussiest of critics. Though their lyrics are characteristically British, their sound and energy have universal appeal. Look out for Welly on the international stage soon. Their escape from the suburbs is well under way. 

An Interview with Welly at The Bodega Social Club

After their show at Nottingham’s The Bodega on the 9^th of October, Welly met me in the beer garden for an interview. After he lit a cigarette and apologised about the footprints on the back of his white shirt from rolling around on stage, I asked about the making of his first album Big in the Suburbs.

Q: You said it took five years to write the album. When did you start thinking about it? 

Welly: I probably first started writing songs after Reading Festival in 2019. We saw Sports Team play and I just heard Working Men's Club and I was just about to move to uni. And I thought “oh, I could do this” in a really awful, cocky way. 

Then gradually I started accruing songs about the suburbs, because I'd moved out of the suburbs to Brighton, you know, city life and all that. Then suddenly, the irony of leaving the place that I wanted to leave for so long—I suddenly had this awful home sickness I’d never had before to a place that…

Welly trailed off in what I assumed was an effort to articulate his thoughts accurately. I appreciated the depth of thought and real-time honesty behind his answers. He continued:

Welly: It’s funny to be homesick to a place that is essentially very, very dull. So, the album grew out that, and [there were] lockdowns, and then I just wrote, and wrote, and wrote it. It's not that I was sat down with a pen for five years. I think if anyone listens to the album, they would go, “Did this really take five years? It doesn’t sound like it took five years. It sounds like he wrote it in about half an hour with a deadline.”

It's a talent to make hard work look effortless. Welly’s music has been crafted for an easy, no-strings-attached listen – it takes any burden of decoding off of the audience and that’s what makes their live shows an effortlessly enjoyable time.

Q: From when you conceptualised the album, does it sound like what you thought it was going to sound like? 

Welly: No. I've never been asked that before and its no. I think the way I write songs and the way the band and I record them… they get lost in translation and sometimes that’s for the better. If you're trying to force a song to be something it's not, then the end result won't be…

Welly’s train of thought was totally cut short by a cackling woman in the lively beer garden.

Welly: You’re going to have some horrible laugh on this recording.

He was correct, but here we are in writing and luckily for you, reader, I managed to make out the rest of his answer which includes a hint about a new Welly release. 

Welly: There is a hard separation, but you have to let the song be what it's going to be. I think a lot of the ones on the first album to our detriment, not to have a go at the album, sound a bit like they've been shepherded into a sound. I've tried too hard to make it something. These next songs that are going to start coming out soon, they're a lot more spontaneous because I wrote them three months ago, and now they're getting recorded. They've not been bashed around for five years.

On a lot of the first album, I'm cramming so many lyrics into every verse just because I've just been sat around. We didn't gig it for three years, I just kept workshopping it, and workshopping it. I think they are maybe a bit over edited.

Welly shares the plight of many great musicians: having extremely high expectations for his music. It’s an ailment which follows the pursuit of passion, and Welly is no exception. He’s started off strong and is already reflecting on this first release and other pop releases to inform the direction of his new music. 

Q: Are you looking to branch into other genres? Would you ever do a ballad or something like that? 

Welly: So, I don't know, I sort of have this fear with Welly where I'm like, “no, they just want it to be, like punky, poppy stuff”. But the day that Brat came out, I finished work, went to the record shop and bought it. I'm gonna sound like really pretentious, but I thought “I think this is going to be quite important”. And I sat down and listened to it in my work clothes when I got in and I literally felt sick because I was like, “Oh God. This makes everything before sound so rubbish”.

You don't need to repeat the verse. You don’t need to repeat a chorus- You just back, back, back, back, back, different melodies in two minutes, that is all you need. I think that's what we're trying to do now. That's what we want… I'd like a balance maybe, but I'd like to do a slightly soppier song. Also, PinkPantheress is by far my favourite artist. And I wanna write songs like that. 

Welly is inspired by artists who redefine music with unconventional creativity. I suspect Welly’s new release will be innovative, breaking free from the defined sound in his first album.

All this talk about some surprising influences made me curious about what else had inspired Welly’s take on music. The album is full of historical, pop culture, and general British references, a lot of which you would need some prerequisite knowledge to pick out. 

Q: I want to know what kind of media you consumed that made you write this album and write ridiculous Instagram captions and make all these references. What are you watching / reading / listening to?

Read a couple captions on @Worldwidewelly on Instagram and you will have the same question. 

Welly laughed.

Welly: So, on a pretentious level, the books I was reading was Hanif Kureishi‘s “The Buddha of Suburbia”. It’s just a book about a lad getting out of the suburbs. And what was the other book I fell in love with during the time? I love Martin Amos, so I read "Money", "London Fields" and they’re really good character studies. A lot of songs on the first album are stories about people, it’s all third person. 

In terms of all the Englishness when we play live, do you know Bob Mortimer? There was a TV show in the 90’s called “Vic and Bob’s Big Night Out”. They just went on stage and would throw stuff at the wall. It was just random, miscellanea, in the same way that we like to talk about random English things. 

There’s a lot of nostalgic television, British television, kids TV shows… What's really interesting is if you look at American children’s TV shows, it's all like, you could be superman! You could be batman! You can be a superhero, be the president! The English ones are just like, you could be fireman, maybe a postman. English children are growing up to not not be aspirational but just almost to be quietly optimistic about what’s going on. 

The latter explains quite accurately the paradox of Welly’s music and what you would call “Britpop” in general. This born and raised Brit masks lyrics that carry cynicism and sometimes heavy social commentary with an upbeat sound. You can enjoy the track Shopping, but remember, unfaltering marketing tactics and capitalism is making you think you “need” what you do not.

Q: You’ve performed in the UK and Europe a lot, would you like to take it international? 

Welly: I don't know if anyone would like it, but, yeah, we'd love that. We'd love to play Australia. I'd love to go to Australia. you know, all of our friends go there all the time.

Q: What have you found the reaction to be performing not in England? 

Welly: We'll just go like, “nanananana”, to the melody of the song so then they can just join it with that. It's very flattering knowing that just on a song level that they resonate with it.

This is always what we try to do. Even if you like you think the music is totally awful, hopefully you can turn around and go, oh, but it's fun and they're having a laugh. We're not taking it too seriously. Then the other problem is if I ever do want to be taken seriously, I don't know if we will. So, I don’t know if I’ve shot myself in the foot. Maybe in a couple albums time, when I’m a bit older. 

Right now, Welly is all about fun and a “Parklife 2025” (Welly’s words) sound. However, the budding artist is interested in exploring new sounds and genres. We don’t know what to expect from Welly next, but I would hazard a guess that it will not be a “Big in the Suburbs 2”. 

Q: What is the collaboration like with the band? 

Welly:  I'm aware that these people don't to be traveling around the country at my beck and call just for me to be calling all the shots all the time… I feel like they need to feel like they' contributing as well. But also, it's because their opinions are great.

They’re also telling me if I’m being a diva. And I’ve known Hannah and Matt for five years now, and Joe and Jacob I’ve known since I was about 11. 

It was then that one of these fondly mentioned members, Joe, sat down next to Welly. We spoke about malaphors (when two idioms are combined into one) and the essential British phrases a foreigner like me should know. 

Welly’s music may be all jokes but the breadth of references they draw upon makes for something deeper than that. To make music that has earned him loyal fans at the release of their first album reflects the potential vetted within the up-and-coming band, Welly.

Aaliyah Field

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Edited by Daniela Roux

Photos courtesy of Welly