It’s a spectacular day to see some of London’s crowning landmarks atop a sightseeing bus, especially since England has been hounded by shower after shower this summer. But Welly isn’t particularly fussed by the city’s architecture or its history-steeped streets. Granted, the Brighton-based musician born Elliot Hall hasn’t been to the capital much, but it’s not what he would show on a tour designed by him. Well, go on mate, NME asks. What would you include instead? Welly frowns in response.
“Wetherspoons,” he muses. “Record shops that still sell CDs. Pizza Express. And a good ice cream shop, now that we can’t get bagels anywhere.”
This is the philosophy of Welly, the frontman of his namesake band who writes cheeky anthems about British suburban life. The fast-talking musician is speaking to NME just before his gig at Soho’s Third Man Records, where he’ll perform with four other friends that form the project. They’ve already entranced audiences on social media thanks to songs like the rowdy ‘Shopping’, which celebrates the hedonism of the high street, and ‘Soak Up The Culture’, which lampoons Brits abroad: “Je voudrais good time!” / “D’ya know the way to Berghain?’ / “My names Holly, I’m from Crawley, and I’m looking for the good wine!”
Hall’s music taste originally sprouted from six songs he’d listen to on repeat on his iPod as a child: The Kinks‘ ‘All Day and All Night’, Squeeze’s ‘Up The Junction’, Jocelyn Brown’s ‘Somebody Else’s Guy’, Take That’s ‘Shine’, Mika’s ‘Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)’, and, he admits with a chuckle, ‘7-11’ by Eskimo Disco (featuring Pingu). But then, his father showed him Pulp’s ‘Common People’; since then, Hall has finessed the fine art of “telling little stories and making mountains of molehills.”
It’s all part of what he terms the “English parochial school of songwriting”, inspired by songwriters like Damon Albarn, Paul Weller and Alex Turner. In small towns, he says, everything’s the same – the cars, the houses, the roads. “All our little differences become huge – something small happens in the supermarket and it becomes an earth shattering event.”
Growing up in Southampton has informed Hall of this suburban purgatory: bombed heavily during World War II, he says the city is “the same as every town in most parts of England, where it’s like: Greggs, jewellers, pub, four charity shops… the only things that are recession-proof.”
Credit: Rosie Carne
What powers Hall’s attention to detail is his love for people watching; ‘Shopping’ was written whilst working part-time at Poundland and as a greengrocer, and he routinely makes trips to the pub to people watch. “I’ll sit in a pub and just stare,” he says. “It’s quite meditative. I love feeling like I get to observe without getting involved. I would always walk around my town, probably being a bit weird, staring in windows and watching people live. Which I suppose is quite a bizarre, sad thing to do. But I love the feeling of watching life pass – I always want the room with a view.”
Before he was a musician, Hall had ambitions to become a train driver, where he would sit in dreary stations and watch the locomotives chug past. (For those asking, his favourite is the Great Western 14XX). But his trainspotting career was abruptly halted when his first girlfriend broke up with him aged 16; Hall decided he would take up either skateboarding or guitar. “I did skateboarding, but I was really crap at it”, he says. “And now I’m with NME on a bus!”
Now, he’s gearing up to release his debut album later this year, which is “the world as Welly sees it – which hopefully is the world for a lot of other people as well.” It’s based on the premise of returning home after a week off work, and all the misadventures that spring out of that. It’s intended as a Where’s Wally (or Welly) of suburban England: “I like the idea of if someone really loved the album, they could play it through and they could find all the characters.”
There are worries that this could be a jingoistic celebration of England, but Welly isn’t interested in rehabilitating Britain’s golden past (“which, let’s be honest, wasn’t great for most people”). Instead, it’s a “pragmatic” celebration of the present. “We need new stuff to care about,” he says firmly. “It’s not all just Shakespeare and Winston Churchill. In the past 100 years, this country’s become so diverse and there’s so many people doing amazing different things. England doesn’t export steel or cars anymore, we export media. There’s so many amazing artists, thinkers, musicians – we should focus on that.”
Credit: Rosie Carne
Making mountains out of molehills, for Welly, isn’t just about magnifying small stories into tall tales; it’s about appreciating what we have already, no matter how unassuming it may appear.
“Look, there are parts of England that are really beautiful,” he says. “And a lot of the parts people don’t think are beautiful – lower-income areas, even the boring suburbs – that is the majority of the country. The English people, by and large, just want to have a laugh, earn enough money to go to the pub, maybe have a nice meal twice a week and not take stuff too seriously.”
The bus begins to amble underneath the stone towers, looking out onto the vast Thames. Welly leans back and gives a small chuckle. “People need to look in their own back gardens and be happy with what they’ve got,” he concludes. “It could be a hell of a lot worse.”
Welly’s new single ‘Deere John’ is out now
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