WELLY – RESIDENT, BRIGHTON 21.3.25
The day has finally arrived! We have been following the hugely tipped Welly from their beginning and have enjoyed the quick-witted humour of founder member and frontman, Welly, on numerous occasions. In that time Welly has grown into a band and thus you have Welly the frontman and Welly the band. We first saw them live back in 2022 around the time of their debut earworm single ‘Me And Your Mates’, and we ended our review of their performance by stating “Welly are a band to look out for”. We knew that we had discovered something exciting and interesting and if our new PE kitted chums stuck at it, they would have a successful music career ahead of themselves.
Today they have dropped their debut 14 track long player ‘Big In The Suburbs’, which as we see it, is already a greatest hits package, despite not containing ‘Me And Your Mates’. But it does contain their ‘Home For The Weekend’, ‘Shopping’, ‘Soak Up The Culture’, ‘Deere John’, ‘Cul-De-Sac’, ‘Big In The Suburbs’, and ‘The Roundabout Racehorse’ singles, and is today joined by their ‘It’s Not Like This In France’ brand new single. This album is jam-packed with cleverly written earworm tunes and I’m rather hoping that a number of the other tunes on the record will also be lifted as singles. There’s eight to choose from: ‘Home For The Weekend’, ‘Knock And Run’, ‘Pampas Grass’, ‘Under Milk Wood’, ‘Family Photos’, ‘Country Cousins’ and ‘Life Is A Motorway’.
The way I see it Welly are the perfect act for almost every music festival, they give off the right positive vibes and are fun all the way. With performances at last summer’s Latitude, Leeds, Reading and Victorious festivals under their belt, I would anticipate many more offering them a slot once they hear the ‘Big In The Suburbs’ album. Welly are perfect for now and offer up suburban discopunk for the CBBC generation. The band of PE-kitted disciples crash, bang and wallop guitars, cowbells and synthesizers through uniquely catchy Dad-danceable songs. It’s The Smiths at a school disco. Vampire Weekend in a village hall. John Betjeman on a bassline.
Crashing together the best bits of escapist pop, indie-disco, punk and DIY electronics, the group—made up of Welly and his school-mates—show early ambition to reconnect the great, grassroots British tradition with the mainstream band. Their single ‘Shopping’, for instance, was a riotous love-letter to the UK high street, as compelled by the arch, art-rock of Pulp as the left-field bangers of Girls Aloud.
So on album launch day, Welly have selected Resident records in North Laine as their ‘venue’ of choice. Not surprisingly there’s a queue outside and running along Kensington Gardens. Fans who are attending have already purchased a copy of the album on vinyl and/or CD in order to be here this evening – Find yours HERE.
At 7:03pm Welly grace us with their presence and immediately the spoken word sample “Now for a moment of light entertainment” by the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Sir John Betjeman nicely sets the tone and the quintet launch into the the album’s title track, namely ‘Big In The Suburbs’. This gives us the first clue that in fact Welly could only ever hail from Britain and nowhere else. They are solely rehoisting the flag that was lowered many moons ago by Blur, Pulp and to some degree The Wedding Present. These Welly compositions have a nostalgia about them, and yet they are very now! This is reflected in the age range of tonight’s punters in attendance. Welly tunes always seem to be joyous adventures and nearly always bring a light-hearted smile to my face, and this is greatly amplified by Welly himself who certainly knows how to work the crowd. An example of this being at the end of this first tune where he states “You’re all being very polite!”. In other words it’s OK for us to let our hair down and have fun! Maybe we were just being very British at that point?
Tune two this evening is the slower less urgent ‘Knock And Run’ and after which frontman Welly goes through his usual spiel of asking folk about their student gap years, which leads nicely into ‘Soak Up The Culture’. However before they played the song the crowd applauded a guy who had come over from Australia to be here. Mid tune and Hannah leaves her Korg workstation in order to start a conga around the shop with some eager punters in tow. Clearly this is a spur of the moment thing as Welly himself has to jump in on keys part the way through the tune. Hannah returns and Welly switches to tambourine and all is well.
Their ‘Shopping’ earworm is up next which is, as always, an enjoyable track. After this Welly straps on an acoustic guitar and they launch into ‘Country Cousins’ which certainly gets my tip for being their next single release. It’s a corker and sums up the Welly nostalgia vibe on account of it containing another Sir John Betjeman sample, this time it’s from the 1973 ‘Metro-Land’ film which celebrates suburban life in the area to the northwest of London that grew up in the early 20th century around the Metropolitan Railway (MR), later the Metropolitan line of the London Underground. I must confess that I’m borderline obsessed with this documentary and have it on DVD. It sounds nerdy and boring doesn’t it, but myself and Welly totally disagree! It’s that nostalgia for a bygone age, like re-reading the 1960’s ‘Ladybird Books’. ‘Country Cousins’ vibe is set around a decade later than the film and it fits very nicely into that post-punk bracket. It’s, for me, the best track tonight.
The acoustic guitar remains as they perform their ‘Life Is A Motorway’ ballad, which has the feel of David Bowie’s quieter material around the time of ‘Metro-Land’, or as one of my friends stated to Welly “That’s your ‘Wonderwall’ number”. For this Hannah uses the melodica, an instrument that always intrigues me. They conclude their 33 minute set with the uptempo ‘It’s Not Like This In France’ which sees bassist Jacob whizzing into the crowd for the final time. He had first done this during the opening number. As expected this had been a triumphant album launch show and it was pleasing to see the band take the time to talk to fans after the performance had finished, whilst they signed vinyl and CD copies of the album.
In support of ‘Big In The Suburbs’, Welly are heading out on tour. Ticket links for each concert can be found HERE. Welly will be performing in Worthing at the Charles Dickens pub located at 54-60 Heene Road on Friday 18th April and tickets for that night can be found HERE. They will also be back in Brighton on 16th May as part of ‘The Great Escape’, where they will be appearing on Brighton Pier, at Horatios no doubt.
Welly:
Welly – lead vocals, acoustic guitar, cowbell, keys
Hanna Witkamp – keyboards, maracas, tambourine, melodica, backing vocals
Joe Holden-Brown – guitar, backing vocals
Matt Gleeson – guitar, backing vocals
Jacob Whitear – bass, backing vocals
Welly setlist:
‘Big In The Suburbs’
‘Knock And Run’
‘Soak Up The Culture’
‘Shopping’
‘Country Cousins’
‘Life Is A Motorway’
‘It’s Not Like This In France’
Fancy reading Welly’s press release for the album? Then read on….
WELLY is an extraordinary character with a remarkable knack for writing whip-smart, playful, funny and terrifyingly refreshing indie pop whose first collection of said songs have now been released as his debut album, ‘Big In The Suburbs’. Following on from the epic precursor singles ‘Shopping’, ‘Soak Up The Culture’, ‘Deere John’, ‘Cul-De-Sac’, ‘Big In The Suburbs’ and ‘The Roundabout Racehorse’, the album lands with another burst of brilliance with focus single ‘It’s Not Like This In France’.
On ‘It’s Not Like This In France’, Welly explains:
“It could be worse, right? Neither a flag-shagger’s anthem nor a sarcastic taunt of British life, this song is, if anything, a retaliation to the one-dimensional slagging of Britain that we hear in so many dull punk songs at the moment. Yeah, things are bad, but I listen to music for a different reason.
“It’s an agnostic ‘It Could Be Worse’ singalong. It ain’t pretty, but it’s ours. ‘It’s Not Like This In France’, but it’s not like this anywhere, really. It’s not better; it’s not worse. What’s good is that it’s ours. We know the neighbour, the bloke in the corner shop, our work colleagues, our grandparents. This is what’s important. This is what the whole album is about. Look up your own street first before down your nose, or through a telescope or telephone screen.
“Written on the M6 Northbound, near Stafford. As it should have been.”
The ‘Big In The Suburbs’ album centres on the monochrome mundanity but also the unsung beauty of the suburbs; 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. Here 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 (and your Mum’s).
Welly 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.
The title track announced the album in the latter stage of 2024 and ‘The Roundabout Racehorse’ bolted into 2025 as Welly ran the final furlong towards the album release. With inspiration ranging from the parochial storytelling of Blur to the intellectual electronica of Pet Shop Boys to kitchen-sink noughties bangers like Girls Aloud, Welly show early ambitions to reconnect the great, grassroots British tradition of mainstream bands being beamed straight into your claustrophobic living room.
Welly’s own suburban story has quickly become the stuff of urban myth. The group’s frontman, 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 to ‘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 – as the band booked over a hundred DIY gigs and launched their own live album and mockumentary aka Welly’s dissertation ‘Live In A Village Hall’. Welly are 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.
“The suburbs are a total microorganism of modern British society,” says Welly, “the purgatory of class and status, copycat compounds of 5 shops (Co-op, Coral, Age UK, another Co-op and a chippy that charges for 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 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 his mystery gang of band mates: Jacob and Joe on bass and guitar, friends since school, 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”.
A Welly live show 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 who landed on this stage and you get to join us in our pop dystopia for an hour, not suffering sweaty obnoxious blokes with guitars and greasy hair constantly asking if you’re ‘having a good time?’ It’s over”.
After the band cut their teeth at ad-hoc DIY shows across the country, Welly booked their first full National Service Tour in 2024 and were invited to support Sports Team in November. Early 2025 saw them headline the DORK Hype List Tour and they recently announced a Spring run of headline shows in seaside towns for, you guessed it, The Seaside Tour.
Before Welly embarked on his journey towards pop stardom, he turned his hand to a megamix of jobs and currently works 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, the laugh and the life. It’s evolving into a life where he now 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, everyday 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.
WELLY TOUR DATES:
MARCH
Fri 21 BRIGHTON Resident Records Instore
Sun 23 LONDON Rough Trade East Instore
Mon 24 GOSPORT Slice of Vinyl Instore
Tue 25 SOUTHAMPTON Vinilo Records Instore
APRIL
Tue 08 FALMOUTH Cornish Bank
Wed 09 PLYMOUTH Junction
Thu 10 WESTON SUPER MARE Loves Café
Tue 15 SWANSEA Bunkhouse
Wed 16 ISLE OF WIGHT Strings Bar and Venue
Thu 17 BOURNEMOUTH Bear Cave
Fri 18 WORTHING Charles Dickens
Tue 22 BLACKPOOL Bootleg Social
Wed 23 DUNDEE Beat Generator
Thu 24 NORTH SHIELDS Three Tanners Bank
Fri 25 HARTLEPOOL Studio
Sat 26 HULL The Welly
MAY
Thu 01 RAMSGATE Music Hall
Fri 16 BRIGHTON The Great Escape Festival (The Pier)
Tickets available HERE.
