Southampton’s Welly have premiered their brand new single Shopping – available now alongside an exuberant music video that introduces one of the UK’s most exciting new bands.
You can watch the video here.
Satirical, sincere and startlingly accomplished, Shopping is as razor-sharp a send up of modern consumerism as it is a rallying cry against the slow death of the UK high street. On their first official single, Welly set out their blueprint for pop on a budget: Shopping collides passions ranging from the indie, suburban storytelling of Blur or the arch electronica of Pet Shop Boys to kitchen sink maximalists like Girls Aloud but is rooted in the deeply human need to always want more than you have.
Shopping, says Welly, “is about the ‘grass is greener’ mentality, not just in products and tat, but in your surroundings. There’s such beauty to that Yuppie era, the feeling that it would never end. Now there’s these cathedrals to excess up and down the country, shopping centres and high streets left to rot. I find them so romantic. So people complain about their local areas being crap, but then they buy their stuff online and they dodge their taxes. Which means all that’s left are vape emporiums and retail parks. It shouldn’t die, they shouldn’t knock these places down, it’s our history. 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.”
Welly are a five-piece band led by their titular frontman, songwriter and producer. Playing with notions of artifice and aspiration, style and self, Welly was born in Southampton and showed no interest in music as a kid: he 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. Other people – and how they lived their lives – proved far more fascinating, with the influence to this day of writers like Alan Bennett and John Betjeman who located the sublime in the suburbs and captured everyday lives on the brink of going berserk. In 2014 Welly’s Dad sat him down to watch the video to Common People and he saw for the first time how art could also be found in the aisles of the supermarket. Welly, of course, had to form a band.
In the last year or so Welly have blazed their own chaotic trail through the grand tradition of DIY. Developing his skills as a producer and writer, Welly channelled the journalistic rule of observational lyricism through jobs at Poundland and Peppa Pig World and he currently works as a greengrocer. In 2023 he also produced Live In A Village Hall for his dissertation; a live album, mockumentary and sparsely attended red carpet event in the ambitious lineage of Stop Making Sense, which spotlighted the glamp stomp thrills of early demo Me And Your Mates.
There followed a hundred self-booked gigs and press releases with bespoke QR codes that were distributed by Welly themselves across labels, the media and radio stations. Building an enthusiastic early fanbase, such rites of passage may prove vital if Welly are to reconnect the grassroots with the mainstream, as their memorable frontman hopes: “I want music to uplift me and make me feel cool and collected. I take my inspiration from the 80s in that way; the threat of nuclear war, the miners’ strike, privatisation, crap government – what did pop do? Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go and Girls On Film … almost laughably dancing whilst all hell opened up. Where is that now when we need it most?”
Beginning with Shopping, austere times demand even bigger dreams. Welly are officially open for business.
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