Following the release of their debut Big In The Suburbs LP in March this year, which itself followed the epic precursor singles Shopping, Soak Up The Culture, Deere John, Cul-De-Sac, Big In The Suburbs, The Roundabout Racehorse and It’s Not Like This In France, Welly continue their journey across the UK with an October tour that will see them play their biggest headline shows to date, bringing them to Southampton’s Papillon on October 14th.
After the band cut their teeth at ad-hoc DIY shows across the country, Southampton’s Welly booked their first full National Service Tour in 2024 and were invited to support Sports Team on several dates in November. Early 2025 saw them headline the DORK Hype List Tour and they are currently on a run of headline shows in seaside towns for, you guessed it, The Seaside Tour.
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 were released as his debut album, Big In The Suburbs. The 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’s own suburban story has quickly become the stuff of urban myth. The group’s front man, 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 for him. 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.
“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.”
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. But things appear to be changing for Welly and his band of brothers and sister 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 idiosyncratic but relatable tales of existence, and sharing his pin-point commentary on normal, everyday life, all wrapped 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.
October
Thu 02 LEEDS Headrow House
Fri 03 EDINBURGH Cabaret Voltaire
Sat 04 GLASGOW King Tuts
Mon 06 MANCHESTER Yes (Pink Room)
Tue 07 CARDIFF Ifor Bach
Thu 09 NOTTINGHAM Bodega
Fri 10 BIRMINGHAM Sunflower Lounge
Sat 11 BRISTOL Exchange
Mon 13 BRIGHTON Chalk
Tue 14 SOUTHAMPTON Papillon
Wed 15 LONDON Scala
Tickets: welly.os.fan
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Southampton Calling – Welly’s debut album, Big in the Suburbs, is an authentic voice of our city
Review: Welly: Dork Hype List Tour, Heartbreakers, 13 February 2025