Maverick musician Welly has just shared his satire-drenched debut album. Below, he takes Wonderland on a trip through it, track-by-track.
Emerging as a thrilling and bohemian presence in the UK guitar music landscape, the elusive allure and free-wheeling wit of Welly is as deft as it is daring. Most easily nestled within the current indie pop renaissance, there’s a rip-roaring nuance to the enigmatic artist’s satire-driven lyricism, and a lively and progressive tint to the crowd-pleasing instrumentation.
Highly-anticipated self-produced debut album Big In The Suburbs has just been shared, and sees Welly and his band cement their acclaim amongst indie’s vanguard through the dissection of British life in the country it was made. It’s the highs and lows of modern existence; the glory and strife of suburbia and the stained-glass dangers of patriotism, told through an idiosyncratic and endearing lens.
A sharp and fearless songsmith, Welly’s winding prose and fruity backdrop pack a potent punch and are sure to get your head nodding. Below, he unpicks the track-list, one song at a time, in a Wonderland exclusive.
Listen to Big In The Suburbs…
Read the track-by-track…
“I’ve chosen to take them on a guided tour of the suburbs…“
“BIG IN THE SUBURBS”
Laying out the market stall here. I let John Betjeman do the heavy lifting first of all, because with first impressions, you only get one.
A definite surf sound here. The lyrics set out the 45 minutes (or day? or week?) ahead of a visit to suburbia, like nowhere, like anywhere, like everywhere. The contents page, the prologue, the menu…
Written, believe it or not, in the waiting room of Sussex General A&E, after having a seizure. Cosmic. My flatmate later pointed out that the chorus sounds like ‘Everything is Awesome’ from the Lego movie. When we came to record it (at my Dad’s house in rural Scotland), we were happiest with the clap sound most of all. I still didn’t have a lot of the lyrics by the time we got to the highlands, so much so that the ‘Sophie’s on the Sofa’ words and melody arrived on a brisk walk 5 minutes before we put it down.
“HOME FOR THE WEEKEND”
Lyrically born from a railway journey home, Brighton to Southampton. It was cold, it was dark, but everything glowed, in that way when the whole world winks at you for a while. Everything in it’s right place or whatever. November 2020, later that same week I misheard a Paul McCartney riff and interpolated that into the guitar part. (Is mishearing theft?) When we play it live, I used to try and reel off the stations in the local area (a la station platform announcements), but now we chant New York, London, Paris, Plymouth*
One of the most accurately autobiographical stories on the album. I’m the protagonist here, rather than half-true portraits we’ll come to hear in the next 40 minutes. Introducing the ‘hero’. Or villain.
*insert whichever wonderful suburb we’re playing that night.
“KNOCK AND RUN”
I know a lot of lads like this. When we go to the local over homebound Christmases, they’ve not changed since school. Not quite playing Knock and Run, perhaps, but still count themselves the biggest boys in the ‘burb.
All set to a school disco beat. Recognise the rhythm? (Heeey Macarena…)
Joe plays a meek labourer in the outro, had us howling during the session.
“DEERE JOHN”
A good bit of character-analysis here. Provincial Portraiture. Ray Davies, Ian Dury, Suggs, Paul Weller, Damon Albarn, Kate Bush, Alex Turner, Kate Nash, any of them would have sung about John in their own way. I wanted to have an antagonist like one of theirs.
“SOAK UP THE CULTURE”
Okay, so much for the lads that stayed at home, what about the ones that left?
One of those songs that arrived, fully formed, in about 15 minutes. Those are the special ones. That mad synth noise at the end that sounds like a harmonica is from the 2020 demo – I could never replicate it.
“SHOPPING”
What happens when all the shops are gone? When every centre is a block of flats, every ‘front has its windows misted and their counters skipped, where will we go? The internet doesn’t have a scent, or a smile, or a shakeaway. Actually, even my high street doesn’t have a shakeaway anymore. (RIP.)
I took a while to perfect these lyrics – I wanted to be as succinct as possible, the precinct is a matter close to my heart. A love song to a predicted nostalgia.
Written in a guitar shop in Barnstaple.
“CUL-DE-SAC”
Time for a love song, but a cocky, brutish one at that. Honorary mention of the Heartbreakers in Southampton, where I realised I hated post-punk and wanted my bands to be more like Dick and Dom than just dicks.
We hit some notes here that we can’t really do live. Some may argue we can’t hit them on the record, either. We’d never played this live before recording, in fact Matt and Hanna hadn’t even heard it. I’d done the backing tracks on my own in 3 weeks before the band joined me in Scotland, and by the time we’d finished, the walls were plastered with the lyrics I’d written perhaps four years ago, but they had read for just the first time.
“PAMPAS GRASS”
Out of one love story and into another. Curtain twitcher’s anthem. I had so much fun with the lyrics. Originally written as a Divine Comedy-esqe string quartet. It sounded to me like adolescent moroseness, a forgotten pulp song, so I wrote a hidden-lover’s tale, like Babooshka oir the Pina Colada song.
Joe plays the guitar chords for the climax til the end, and he”d never even heard the song before. We pressed record, and I shouted the chords at him as he went. First take. We all jumped around him like he was headlining Glasto.
I, your tour guide and narrator to the suburbs, am quite drunk by this point, and about to have a long and sleepless night. I plan on keeping you up.
“THE ROUNDABOUT RACEHORSE”
Side two really kicks off. We’ve finished exploring the local characters for now, so time for some self-reflection. We’re busy judging everyone else for growing up (or not), but what about us?
Proper Duran Duran sound to this. One of my favourite bands. Such simple, addictive songs.
“UNDER MILK WOOD”
Still swimming in the same pool of self-doubt as “The Roundabout Racehorse”, and time for someone else to narrate. A late night torment. Is it my inner voice? Is it a God? Is it Dylan Thomas?
No, it’s my Dad.
I’d listen to the original 1950’s radio play (the Antony Hopkins performance) most evenings in the summer of last year after work. Such wonderful tableaux of everyday drama. It starts at night, goes until sunset, drops in and out of different significantly insignificant characters… sounds familiar.
“FAMILY PHOTOS”
Right. Time to get to the bottom of it all. Stare at some pictures of us as children and pretend not to cry. Are we really unhappy? Or am I just hungover? I think we get to the bottom of it all. Or as close as we’d like to. Same as it ever was, mother’s eyes…
Written the same day, in fact the same hour, as “Soak Up The Culture”. I hope the recording does it justice – I know it’s not the most hi-fi recording, this album, as I believe you can only make your first album once, and should do it on your own terms. Warts and all on this track, I hope you still find it as prettily provoking as it feels to me.
“COUNTRY COUSINS”
Now then! Starting to see the sun squinting back at us. Feels like a sunday. We have company. And now we’re feeling rather protective. I quite like it here. ‘It ain’t pretty, but it’s mine’.
A sunny winter’s day in the Scottish dugout, Joe and I in the little spire of the house recording the acoustic guitars.
“IT’S NOT LIKE THIS IN FRANCE”
Okay, buster, now not only do I rather like it here, but this whole Britain place isn’t so bad either. Well, it’ll do anyway. We haven’t much choice but optimism at the moment.
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 we hear in so many dull punk songs at the moment. 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.v We know the neighbour, the bloke in the corner shop, our work colleagues, a grandparent. 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.
“LIFE IS A MOTORWAY”
And there we have it. You can run, you can drive, but the grass is greener from the patio.
The last thing we recorded, the only proper ‘live’ track – us, in a circle, in a Scottish midnight, dreaming of the suburbs, in the same way the suburbs dream about the sun.
And there we have it. A brief tour along the spiritual bus-route of my suburban visage. Listen again for yourself. You might find more gnomes in the garden.
