Welly’s boots are still normal-sized

Fittingly, this is what Welly are all about – a true juxtaposition of cheap and cheerful amid an increasingly bleak backdrop, the band’s sprightly take on mundane commuter-belt British living peppered with nostalgic disco-punk instrumentals that your parents likely bonded over decades ago. Hall’s apathy for the longest month of the year, however, is surpassed by his disdain for the influx of mopey post-punk that he’s made an effort to avoid sounding like.

“I feel like when I go out, I get more value for money being at an indie disco, so naturally I would want to write songs like that. From what I can tell, people are looking for more positivity in their music,” he says. For Hall, if he’s getting buzzed and going out dancing, the last thing he wants is to feel sad. “With a lot of the shows we’ve played, the audience often consists of people who tell us that they don’t usually go out but had heard about us through a friend who had seen us previously and decided to give us a go on a whim. I think what’s missing from modern pop is being able to laugh at yourself! Depth is fine, but you need to have a little bit of sugar on top,” he grins.

Hall recalls seeing a ‘serious’ post-punk band when he was 16 – serious insofar as they stated that the song they were about to play was about a friend who passed away. Evidently, this wasn’t what Hall and his friends had paid money to see. “This is going to sound awful but it’s almost like we were playing bogeys trying not to laugh as the bassist burst into tears. We ended up leaving the gig early to go listen to Gorillaz and Happy Mondays in the park from across the venue, which we enjoyed way more than what we’d paid to see… I like our songs because they’re simple; I don’t want to be shouted at! Like, come on, man – why are you having a go at me?” he chuckles.

While the band are named after Hall’s childhood nickname, Hall reassures me that it’s more like how Scooby Doo is named after the main character. “I don’t want to think of it as me getting carried away and I’ve got four hired goons,” he admits. “If anything, I’m lucky to have Hannah, Matt, Jacob, and Joe. I’ll still pitch the basic idea of the songs to them, but if it’s naff then they just won’t do it, and I trust their opinions.”

Welly’s PE-kit-uniform aesthetic brings a strong sense of whimsical fun to their live shows. In terms of where everything started, Hall brings it back to his passions at school – an ethos that he continues to follow when describing Welly’s sound as the ‘primary colours’ of music. “Football definitely gave me a complex because I was a short arse and played in goal. My first musical memory was during a rainy day in primary school where we played ‘baby steps’ and stomped around. I didn’t care about English at GCSE, but at the age I’m at now [22], I would kill for someone to sit me down and talk about the deeper meaning of a [Sergei] Rachmaninoff piece! Back then, all I wanted to do is play drums and listen to Arctic Monkeys.”

“It makes me so happy knowing that when my mum was at school she had to learn ‘Greensleeves’ on the recorder, as part of the national curriculum,” he elaborates. “That simplicity is what I want; it’s so funny to me how we have accepted this naff ‘cottage industry’ school education for music. Weirdly enough that’s also what I want – I’m not trying to bend the parameters of music.”

Following the success of viral hit “Shopping”, Hall spent a month alone at his father’s house in a remote part of Scotland, trying to fine-tune five years’ worth of material before bringing the rest of his bandmates into the fold. Everything you hear on Big In The Suburbs was self-recorded on borrowed musical equipment. Hall states that before the rest of Welly arrived, everything instrumentally was a bit too mechanical for his liking and lacking human touch. His bandmates also politely asked him to take a break as Hall was a “pain in the arse to work with,” despite for the most part enjoying the process of writing away from all the outside world’s distractions.

Being able to record in such a secluded setting allowed Welly to experiment more than ever before – at one point, Hall recorded his father reciting a passage from an old radio drama series called Under Milk Woods by Dylan Thomas. “I read it in the bath recently and it was very good, and it’s literally just gone out of copyright as of a year ago. We were really pissed, and because we were off-grid I recorded it on a Blackberry 9360 from 2011. He probably doesn’t remember – he might hate it to be fair!” Hall shrugs.

“We would record everything in a little one-room stable; it definitely all sounds homemade. In my head I thought, ‘Well, you only get to make your first album once.’” Hall states that the more he demos on his own and becomes excited about the future, the more aware he is that he has a plethora of voice-notes on his phone to choose from. “I hope people listen to this and go, ‘Oh my god, what will they do next?!’ So back to what I was saying before – very cottage industry and we’re all very proud of it.”

Amongst their sardonic observations of normie British people abroad on cuts like “Soak Up The Culture” and the suburban domestic bliss of “Cul De Sac”, Hall and co. have plenty of songwriting depth to show off in 47-ish minutes. One such addition is “Pampas Grass” – a electric modern romance dance story about two people who are clueless to the fact that they are sleeping with the same person – as well as being a homage to Kate Bush’s “Babooshka”. “Originally, that was written with a string quintet, double bass, and viola — I ditched all that and just whacked it out on guitar one day and there you go!”

In addition to playing the likes of Reading & Leeds, Dot to Dot, and Bestival in 2024, Welly returned to Scotland in November of the same year to wake the sleepy town of Kilmarnock, situated around 30 miles south of Glasgow. The stop proved to be an interesting highlight of their tour as there were only four attendees who weren’t venue staff or members of the support band. To Hall’s delight, the audience still gave it all they had. “We said to the audience afterwards that they could have guestlist sorted for life – the bar staff thought that was unfair because technically they had to watch us too!”

With a seaside town tour on the horizon, a dedicated nationwide fanbase, and plenty of other tricks up his sleeve, Hall explains where his onstage energy comes from and how you, too, can have as much fun performing on stage as Welly does.

“If you’re being put on for something, whether you’re a poet or a musician, that opportunity alone should be your first spring in your step! Jarvis Cocker used to go on stage and basically say anything that would come to his mind. I don’t know where my needless whoring for attention comes from. So first thing, if you don’t have that instinct, don’t bother. There seems to be this weird culture where you ‘have to be the best’ and ‘lock in’ all the time. Someone reviewed us recently and said: ‘Welly, very smug and irritating, but excellent tunes.’ And you know what? I’ll take that!”