Meet your new favourite band.
Suburban disco punks Welly are a collective bundle of joy with a purpose to entertain. Down to earth and up for fun, their energetic anthems and affinity for PE kits and Village Halls have gained them somewhat of a cult following. So let’s get to know them.
“Me, Joe and Jacob were in a band years ago back in Southampton,” explains frontman Elliot Hall, “and then I went to uni and started writing my own stuff and started to gradually persuade them to move to Brighton one by one. Then I found Matt in a sexual health seminar at the first week of uni, and Hannah worked at The Green Door Store, so I found her there. It all happened quite quickly.”
On their sound, Elliot jokes, “We usually call it dance punk, but we’re just sort of ripping off Pulp! We want it to sound like it was made by the person next door. What’s quite cool is when you watch old Top of The Pops clips, everyone just looks as if they were somebody that you grew up with - they look really relatable, and pop’s become this thing that’s so sort of extradited, and it’s gone so far beyond the human experience and how I feel when I listen to pop.”
So who inspires the band next door? “The Pet Shop Boys, Madonna, Harry Hill, and Our Lord Jesus Christ,” answers Elliot. “XTC are a big inspiration, but the way I write songs and the way I approach being a musician is definitely inspired by The Pet Shop Boys and Madonna. Everyone seems to say Blur but I think that’s slightly general, I think there’s a bit more to it than that. They’re a huge huge influence, but it’s more Damon Albarn as a person or as an icon as an influence - the same for Jarvis.”
In all aspects, Welly are not your typical five-piece. Playing with a drum machine instead of a drummer at their live shows has given them the opportunity to make use of the full stage, running around in the space while they play (do the PE kits make sense now?). “In the band we used to be in I played drums,” reflects Elliot, “I think I realised that it would be a lot easier to gig without them… I feel like the drum machine’s not really in at the moment, so we thought we were gonna get rid of it and grow up and get a drummer in - and then all of our fans said a resounding no, keep it! It’s got a name - we call it Dr Um Machine.”
With their live shows becoming known for their high energy antics, Elliot muses, “I suppose it’s sort of like a bus stop pantomime. It’s trying to bring a bit of show back, like we come on and we do a big dance sequence, but we have someone come on and do the sort of ‘Roll up, roll up, scream if you wanna go faster’ intro. So the dream would be in five years I would like the live show to be like a pantomime, and we’d play it in theatres and the songs would be like a story and we’d have costume changes - but at the moment, when we’re playing in glorified toilets you don’t want to bring too much cloth cus it would get dirty quite quick.”
Rising up through the Brighton scene, Elliot comments, “We absolutely love it! It’s really accommodating, it’s very welcoming, there’s loads of good venues, there’s loads of good promotors - and people want to go see gigs there, which isn’t the same as other towns. From what we’ve heard when we play other shows is you get the same crowd in every night, they’ll go see everything, and it’s hard to get people who aren’t into music to come to shows with a band they don’t know. What I like about Brighton is that people will just show up to whatever is going on, and people are really nice, it’s really lovely. We’ve come out really well mainly off the back of having such a supportive scene out there.”
From performing their first gig at a local pub, the band have come a long way and are currently in the studio in Scotland working on some new music. “We record all of it completely ourselves in this little old lodge-house/ stables and we sleep upstairs. I’ll lay down the base stuff and then the band will join me and we’ll add all the backing vocals, they’ll add their bits to give it character and make it sound like a group thing because I don’t like it when it sounds like one person sort of going mental on their own.”
With new music in progress, we’ll be sure to hear a lot more from Welly soon. On the future, Elliot teases, “We’re sort of working really hard behind the scenes before we pull the curtain back in a couple of months or so. We’re playing some festivals, we’re gonna have a few singles out this half of the year and we’re touring a lot, the details of which will come soon.”