Welly - What's All This Fuss About?

Welly - What's All This Fuss About?

Pictures by Joshua Husband

While Doom scrolling through Instagram on a depressingly mundane Thursday night, I view a close friend of mine's Instagram story of this band performing in PE kits and singing about 'The sweet mix of lynx and regret'. That band is the great Welly whose music is the perfect mix of witty lyrics and "Eat My Shorts" levels of 80s influence instrumentally. This can be seen most obviously in Welly's debut single "Me And Your Mates" which sounds like it can be found on the mixtape of the male lead of an 80s horror film and respecivley on a BBC 6 editorial playlist. Their live EP "Welly: Live in a Villiage Hall (Live in a Village Hall)" is a perfect demonstration of Welly's quality and the only album cover I've seen to date which features Mr Bean. Fresh off playing set after set at Great Escape Festival, Welly agreed to take a break from talking to my mates to talk to me about the wonderful world of Welly.

How did Welly come together?

Well, I moved to Brighton about 4 years ago and got stuck here during lockdown. it was the first time I was away from home for longer than a school residential trip, and I was homesick for the town I'd lived in for 18 years. I began to write like a man possessed, and once we were let back out again, I got some friends from an old Britpop cover band we had in Southampton and we put a gig on at our local. that was about 18 months ago, and it's been a right laugh since then.

​​I've heard the Southampton live scene is pretty fun

It's great. There was about 30 of us back in college that would go to absolutely everything. I think the local economy took a hit when we all went to Uni. Lots of Kebab shops losing their weekday cheesy chip revenue. Gets a bad rep because it's lost most of its original Tudor bits - lots of office blocks with charity shops and jewellers on the ground floor. It's pretty if you can find it though, and there's a whole mix of communities there, what with the cruise ships and the container boats. People will take the job on in the Caribbean or South Asia, and then stay here for a while when docked in between jobs. We actually grew up on the outskirts of the town, and you can tell the character of someone by whether they say they live in Southampton or in equally nearby, quaint, rosy-cheeked Winchester. We've all done it.

You have been described as GSCE-Drama Stars and Brit School Dropouts, do you think this reflects in your music?

Absolutely. My guitarist Joe played the lead in Singing in the Rain in Year 10. He has a tattoo of an umbrella just above his arse. That's why we still wear our PE Kits, this is the closest thing to exercise we still do. We want the shows to be almost pantomime-esqe - the years of seeing miserable lads in expensive jackets rock up at the Heartbreakers or Joiners and try to convince us that they're cool is terribly dull to us now. I'm thinking of getting a big spinning prize wheel with the songs on, and the audience to come and spin it to see what we'll get, but some of the options will be to recite GCSE English poetry or to have the crowd do the macarena for the entierety of the next tune. That's value for money. I'm not prepared to spend nearly ten quid on another post-punk band trying to convince me how angry (yet oh-so-thoughtful?!) they are. I can't believe the response we're getting to my music and I plan on acting as chuffed about it as I really am.

I am in dire need of this gig you’ve described pretty please take it to Cardiff.

We were in Swansea last week! We played Sin City to (mainly) Joe's uni mates, we were meant to play the upstairs bar area but there was a problem with the sound desk so we ended up playing the 600-capacity club room. It was cavernous. I should add for your readers that there were not 600 people there but they did put my name in massive letters on the facade like Dolly Parton. I actually put that into the promotors agreement. Tremendous.

I will gather up 600 Cardiffians in the event of Welly in Cardiff.

You sort of covered it in the last question but the band perform live wearing PE kits, is there any importance to this or do you just have great style?

Thanks for saying its great style, Peter, because at one of our shows at The Great Escape a woman came up to Jacob saying she was a personal stylist and that we looked awful. She asked if we already had a P.S., because if not she wanted to take us on, as our PE-kits don't match the music. Which begs the question of what music a PE-kit would sound like.

I think PE kit music can be whatever it wants to be its 2023

Thank you.

Me and Your Mates is Welly’s biggest track, as of writing sitting at just over 10k streams on Spotify, what do you think inspired this success and will we see any more songs instrumentally like this one?

Ah! Yeah instrumentally its a funny one. The first round of stuff I wrote in this body was very Working Men's Club, OMD, Acid-House, early techno, I was dead into The Units and wanted to write Synth-Punk stuff. I still love all that, but I'm writing less in a sequenced synth way now - there are still tunes like that out, Michelangelo (from the Live EP) is a good one, but I'm going more 'Baggy' now if anything. I used to write in a very 'ooh, I want a Human League-ey song in the set!', and would try rip them off, but now it's whatever comes out in a song structure, then I can dress it up in a genre afterwards. I find that it takes about 12 months for whatever I'm listening to to work its way into what I'm writing. So I hope our fans are ready for Spring '24, because I've been listening to nothing but 1960's Afro-Cuban DnB, and try singing about the suburbs over that.

Will Michelangelo be followed by 3 more tracks called Leonardo, Donatello and Raphael?

Don't spill the beans, Peter. Are we really that predictable?

At what point does Welly become a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Rock opera project?

Before we play Michelangelo, I usually ask the audience who their favourite Renaissance painter, and whoever they shouted out is what we would sing in the chorus. That's Pop.

Im Getting Teary-Eyed.

Haha!

A Debut Live EP was a risky choice, why did you decide to go down this route?

Well I was dead happy with what the band and I were doing Live and I wanted to show people that. The full documentary still hasn't come out yet. The hire fees were very reasonable, we hired it out for a weekend in March '22, we ate dinner there, cooking in the little function kitchen. There was a pre-school group that ran there on weekdays and we found where they kept the Tangfastics. I also remember it was absolutely freezing. Everyone said it was a risky choice And then Black Country, New Road nicked the idea completely. Who's risky now, Mum?

There should be a court case in the same vain as Ed Sheeran vs Marvin Gaye but Welly vs BC,NR.

Yeah, BC,NR, you scared? How many of them are there, six? That's not fair. Peter, you'll have to join our team in this mass brawl.

Move over Oasis vs Blur, Welly VS BC,NR is the hot new band rivarly.

Come on Peter, you've got to pick a side

This is like picking a favourite child

We've already tried to start a war with fellow Brighton band Hutch but they're all far too nice for that.

Welly has done a lot of gigs over the last year, if you had to pick a favourite moment what would it be and will we be seeing more this year?

Of this year, Mesmerist for TGE, which was about 3 days ago. We got offered it at the last minute, it was our fourth of the day, we'd been on it since noon and we had managed to pied-piper a load of people that had never seen us before all around town, to a climax at this cocktail bar in the middle of town. It was also the main show that all our mates could go to, so it was this lovely mix of people we knew and didn't know singing a load of unreleased stuff they had only heard for the first time that morning. There's a big, Titanic-like staircase running up the middle of the crowd and it was bouncing. Brilliant. Oh! And also that weekend, we went to Megan's birthday club night at Green Door Store, and they ended up playing Me and Your Mates. We've started getting everyone to spell out MAYM in YMCA style. They got me to crowd surf at the end and i was surprised anyone even bothered to hold me up. Unbelievable.

And now the most important and political question, drink of choice?

I've started having Rum and Cokes a lot, in my endless persuit to be Jarvis Cocker. I don't have even the slightest clue in the difference in taste between dark and spiced, or the other one, I just tell the barstaff to make whatever they personally prefer. But if I'm in the pub on my own, writing or reading or something, i'll go for a bitter. In the lovely town of Lewes, ten miles up the road, they brew Harveys. Have you ever accidentally drunk water out of the hot tap? When it has that attic-ey taste. Harvey's is if they made that 4%. I just assumed you meant drink drink - I do love a Passionfruit Rubicon.

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Dedicated to Kai Mason and Craig David for being the kings of Southampton and absolutely not dedicated to Nathan Jones (Southampton no.1 Enemy, don't get anywhere near Cardiff City)