Make believe
On the new Wellsaid album, friendship, and the ridiculousness of making things
The worst weeks in England are the ones that come right after the clocks fall back an hour at the end of October. The days are violently cut short, our rhythms descend into anarchy, and for dinner I’d often just slice up a tiger tomato. I was in London living on my own when Wellsaid’s song “Lights Out” came out that fall, and I’d put it on repeat as I watched pale figures walk past my window, wanting to be transported back to the crowds back home. I still went to gigs, but I missed my friends. It was during those hardest weeks that Rocky Sum sent me a link to a collaborative playlist titled Imaginary Roadtrip. The rules: only one song per artist, and the songs have to have a flow to them that’s fit for driving.
That playlist ended up becoming a 55-track compilation of indie favourites: Sparklehorse, Jeff Buckley and, in a clear violation of the rule, two Yo La Tengo songs. In my head, I could hear Rocky’s voice talking about his favourite music, taking me back to the conversations about music we’ve had over the years, from The National (depending on the album, either geniuses or the most boring band alive, there is no in between) to Guided by Voices (“the songs might as well have been recorded onto cardboards”). The playlist was a lifeline: the music filled up my empty ground-floor apartment, rendering it a little less lonely. I made it through the coldest months.
“Imaginary Roadtrip” is also the name of the track that opens Wellsaid’s new album, Regretopia. In the decade that I’ve known Rocky he’s put out album after album, and still he often slips into existentialism, wonders what’s the point of making music, of making anything at all. And then half a year later, he announces the band’s written a new set of songs. I’ve never known another human being so committed to not wasting time. Somehow, in between making a new record and starting a label and working at a university and cooking for friends and adopting a very photogenic cat with his girlfriend, he’s managed to learn how to speak Japanese. FUCK PPL WHO MAKE MUSIC, he said, three days before the album came out, cringing already at the prospect of having to self-promote. I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. You made this! Just be proud for fuck’s sake!
It was easier to write about his bands when we didn’t know each other that well, but now we’re actually friends, which given the small size of this “scene” is what everyone ends up becoming – either that, or enemies. We’re also sometimes collaborators – a few years back we even tried (and failed) to get a culture magazine venture off the ground – although most days we just trade recipes and cat stickers and links to 99% Invisible. I’ve interviewed him three times, and I’m running out of words I can use to describe the loud guitars and how tight the band is when they play and the way their diehard fans open up a pit and run on stage at every show, without sounding either repetitive or like I’ve swallowed a thesaurus. I didn’t want to write an interview or a review. Other people have done a better job. When I tell him this, he says, “I look forward to a para-pyschoanalysis piece about my alcoholism.”
He’s kidding, but not entirely. Wellsaid’s sleeper hit, with over 460,000 streams on Spotify, is about Spilling His Guts: “I'll paint the pavement with my insides / in a quiet corner with no one in sight.” On a later track on the same album: “But I – I can’t go too far / with the poison in my blood.” Then, three years later, Lurking opens with the line: “Alpha males drinking stale ale and this feels just like a movie.” Rocky’s first band was called Emptybottles, a reference to draining the alcohol down to the last drop. When my friend Rob started going through the catalogue of Wellsaid albums earlier this year, he asked me, only half-jokingly: “Does Rocky have a drinking problem?”
Songs about drinking are a recurring motif in Wellsaid’s oeuvre, but their lyricism has matured on the new album. There’s still a lot of ennui, but the sentiment’s less jaded. You can interpret the lyric “All that I really know is / I’m dying to live” (“Halloween Heist”) a few different ways – in order to live, one must subscribe to unpleasant chores and duties that feel like death – but I think of it more as a declaration of an intention to stay alive (it’s a Darryl Blacker line rather than Rocky’s, and the pair sing it together on the song). “I’m happy now / but the brain says ‘it always ends’ / So I’m looking at everything with a five year lens” (“Eien”). The end is still dismal – but the view can be rearranged.
Rocky can be a little intimidating from afar; you want him to like you, and he doesn’t like a lot of things. He’s 31 going on 50, and could be on track to becoming one of those grumpy fuckers we see in the scene sometimes, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s very open to changing his mind about people, about music. Beneath his armour of middle fingers and profanities, he can be sweet. A few weeks ago I tell him I’ve been depressed, and he texted back: “We can all go to the sea again and I'll teach you how to sink / and not die.” An unwitting callback to a lyric off Lurking (2022):
We sailed south for an island,
she told me not to hurry,
but I would rather not be afloat
“Interlude” features the scratchy speaking voice of Jabin Law over an instrumental track in a reprised role (he has been featured on Rocky’s projects since at least “Ash Wednesday” on Emptybottles’ In Complete Sentences, released in 2017). Rocky played the song at a show back in 2022, the last gig I attended before I left for London. He had a tray of pedals at his feet, which he glanced at with glee like a kid with their toy trucks, and said that he was trying something new with that solo set. It was slower, more contemplative and experimental, a pause where Wellsaid songs were a punch. The Tai Kok Tsui factory venue was decked with reflective streamers, and I still have a photo of him from that night, drinking a Kirin beer and holding a thumbs up behind the veil, bathed in neon blue lights. “If I get my shit together / we can bash our bodies together,” Rocky sang in a song on his solo project Mellowdrama. It was still the worst summer, but all I needed was to dance very hard with my friends inches away from me.
Come to think of it, I’ve never had a bad time at a Wellsaid show, either. There’s something very pure about watching a bunch of dudes who are just genuinely happy to be in each other’s company. So many creative collectives end up hating each other’s guts, but when Wellsaid said they wanted to live forever, I believe them. Wellsaid as a project is one cemented via friendship, not just between bandmates but with their many collaborators and comrades in the region who make cameos on or influenced the album, from Hom Shen-hao to Super Napkin’s Pillof Yau. Wellsaid is always honest. The older you get the harder it is to meet people who are real, and they’re real ones.
What else? I can tell you about how “Halloween Heist” is a reference to Brooklyn 99, a show Rocky once told me we’re allowed to watch because they’re so bad at their jobs they’re not real cops. How, one time he forgot how to play his own song at a pedal workshop, and a student played it at him on the spot. But, biased or not, I love the new record. Dixon’s bass comes in hard as bullets mere seconds into the first song, and Darryl’s voice on “The Abattoir” provides a good contrast to Rocky’s emo vocals. I can already see nerdy boys screaming the refrain of “fall in / fall out” at the release show. When I’m amidst the crowd that shows up to Wellsaid’s gigs, all exuberance and childlike joy, I think, what more can you ask for.
There is a typo in the line of description under the playlist: “a car ride to the seaside that may or may not happn”. I’ve always wanted to point this out to him so he can fix it, but then I decided I liked it better this way. We’re always going to be a little scrappy, and that’s okay. For the sake of narrative consistency, I put the playlist on when my friends and I drove through the Cotswolds that December, though I still haven’t been on a real road trip. Nothing has to be imaginary – you just have to make it real.