APOPCALYPSE NOW: JESSE WELLES, OLD FRUITMARKET, GLASGOW, 7/12/2025

(This has the odd expletive in it here and there. You will survive reading it)

“The media landscape is saturated with images of violence and sexuality, desperately trying to extract a sort of flicker, a galvanic response from the dead frog’s leg of, you know, the human spirit, and my characters are trying to establish a more meaningful sort of psychological circuitry, that at present is completely overwhelmed by our sort of perverse entertainment landscape” – JG Ballard.

THE STARTING PISTOL:

Like most other people, I first heard the music of American troubadour Jesse Welles earlier this year on social media. It was a random Instagram post from last March, and I will never forget it. Sitting in a toilet in some dive bar, no doubt for the echoey acoustics, the young man belted out his song I Ain’t Got None Of My Friends Left on an acoustic guitar. Being a GG Allin fan, the concept of toilet rock did not shock me, but the idea of toilet acoustic was amusing. So I buckled up for the next twosec social media fuzzbuzz, soon to be forgotten in the instacoming next video wave.

How wrong I was.

The shaggyhair singer started off singing about ketamine wearing off, a clear reference to the psychotic Star Wars-worshipping Afrikaner lunatic Elon ‘Name Sounds Like A Bad 70s Aftershave’ Musk’s drug habit. He then went on to pour out a song of incredible melancholy and poignancy – and poetry. I was floored by lines like

“When they pave over the bodies
 And democratize the stones
 I will leave a Yelp review
 In the valley of the bones
 When the thirsty have their blood
 And all the people’s souls departed
 They can raise the Holy swollen
Golden Temple of the arches”

I sat bolt upright. Just scrolling on the deadbeaten track, I was not expecting such beautiful words. They were a perfect fusion of old and new, apocalyptic ancient stone-flecked imagery mixed with extremely contemporary political and cultural references. They were very zeitgeisty, reflecting the apocalyptic self-harming dreams of a rogue nation on a downward spiral. 

As for the song’s intense defiant melancholy. Well, Scotland is a melancholicoholic nation, as documented in the weary beaten-soul acoustic songs of Glasgow’s Gerry Cinnamon, whom Welles is analogous to, in some ways. We’re old we’re tired we’re eternally internally bleeding, and endless centuries of oppression and pain and internet fragmentation have drummed near-defeat into us. But we still maintain one defiant human spit in the eye of perhaps certain destruction in our quietly screaming mouths, and Welles seemed like he knew the perfect always-freedom score.

To hear words this old and new and tired from a troubled troubadour from a young self-lionising nation run by some of the most blank evil vapid psychopaths ever to walk the half-conquered earth was quite startling in a way, Biblical but door-delivered mutual destruction assured, national annihilation on the near-paid-up installment plan. Welles sang defiantly and bone-wearily of his river-vanished friends, and it choked me up. I felt the tiredness in my assailed bones, as we all do these days to a greater or lesser degree.

The combination of melancholy and poetry and sadness in Welles’s voice really hit some soft perfect vulnerable spot in me, massaging that throbbing bruise inside, you know the one. I must have watched that video ten times in a row. It made such a difference to see an artist online who looked like he was actually feeling something, anything, even if it was marrow-weariness and a desire to spit a few truth-telling poetic gems before finally going under in the same swollen river that had apparently claimed all his tired friends.

I loved it.

I checked back every day for Welles’s near-constant videos posted on parasocial media, where he often stood in a green and pleasant forest clearing setting and changed the lead of everyday American horror news into poetic musical gold, mixed with whimsical idiosyncratic ditties about bovine guts and forbidding insect killing.

                                   

Welles was both very old and very new presentation-wise. He was coming up with instaviral sonic canon fodder, unleashing a constant bitter funny sarcastic poetic word river. This could have rendered him just another online brief stutter-flame novelty, but it was clear he was so much more than that. It was the erudition that did it for me. He posted videos of himself quoting from philosophers and poets, often anti-war, giving his already impressive intellectual and aesthetic range a weight and heft and gravitas it might not already have had. He seemed anachronistic in some ways, a rattling bellyful of brain and tune brawn, spilling knowledge and murdered dream memories at every narroweyed turn.

I really became much more interested in Welles then. He seemed tired and overworked sometimes in his videos, and I vaguely worried about him. Of course, obviously others did too. Many people were watching him round the world, and the cosy intimacy afforded by watching somebody on your phone or PC is just purely that – a delusory illusion. The man’s lodestar began to rise, and he started appearing on prestigious American talent-announcing shows like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. I snagged a ticket for him back last May, and was glad I did, because, unknown as he was then, he soon rose like poetic artistic cream to the top of the mainstream media crop, and the Glasgow gig sold out.

As did everywhere else he played, apparently.

Now. It goes without saying that not everybody is appreciative of what he does. The MA(N)GA cartoon cultists are not a big fan of Welles, for obvious reasons. Whilst he does not explicitly name people like Musk and T---- in his modern protest song shooting gallery, it’s clear whose side he’s on. Except…not entirely. He’s more centrist (“it won’t matter if you’re neo con or MAGA Democrats” as he sings in his superb song Red, a heart-heavy song, all-hold-hands-in-destruction that can move me to near tears; and how can you beat lines like "I got me a red bulldog techno credit bootstraps tugging buddy?"), and refrained from spitting on college-kid-baiter Charlie Kirk when he died, instead commenting on gun rights and wrongs in his song about that horrible polarising ultra-American incident. Maybe that was career savvy, maybe it’s how he really felt, works either way.

In any modern thinking adult, a healthy sprinkling of scepticism goes a long, red-face-and-sanity-saving way. Whilst the ‘lone guitar gunman going down in a blaze of inglory and poetry against all odds’ is a stateside archetype we’ve seen done time and again, it often has ultimately calcified into a grinning clown horror pose, “turning rebellion into money,” to quote The Clash. So whether or not he was a centrist or a leftist or just a human sick of the warring American sides grinding off each other remains – to be seen. After all, “Another protestor’s crossed the line/to find the money’s on the other side” as pop-punk bores Green Day put it.

But the Jesse Welles exhausted war wagon was rolling on across the electronic American plains, flames of indignation and righteous fury crackling in its path. MA(N)GA red hats scowled, liberal onlookers howled, the imperfect landmined path of rising stardom was carefully trodden. Welles looked wary and confounded, and rightly so. Modern fame means absolutely nothing, because you can armpit-fart La Marseillaise on camera and be infamous for fifteen seconds, with your transient spotlight-moment immediately deposed by the mad guy with the paranoid videos whose mind seems to be disintegrating
and who’s going to tell
us a few of his
half-baked
homeless truths
before he goes
down and out
forever.

Talent means nothing anymore, in some ways, which can be frustrating for an artist like Welles who has been noodling around in bands for fifteen years, then all of a sudden gets what he wanted – and then instantly starts wondering if he wanted it after all. It must  be weird to go from recording in a forest to sitting opposite cromag knucklecracker Joe Rogan, a man who knows precisely less than zero about your music but who is trying to hoover up some cred by having you onto his show  so he can babble conspira-shite about his own crackpot obsessions. All part of the entertainment industry song-and-dance routine, laddie, all par for the course in the steprightup Barnum & Bailey viral tumour circus:

And it was funny. I instantly got how Welles was constantly being compared to folk legend Bob Dylan, of course, and I had very vague ideas about Woody Guthrie, another soundalike reference point. The funny thing is I have never been interested in American folk music at all, really. I personally can’t stand Dylan, and would regard his stuff as the furthest point from the punk stuff I grew up listening to, at least musically. But if Welles was going to do such beautiful pained shitkicker poetry, well, the least I could do is listen, and wonder how much he regarded that new-Dylan label as a neck-millstone.

After all, legends are not easy to live up to, and it seems unfair to judge a 21^st century upncomer by a spent dead 20^th century set of supposed artistic sellout ethics. The times they have a-changed, for bitter and for worse and for verse; the grounded-voltage ‘honest folk singer’ currency Bob Dylan and others traded in withered a long time ago on the exchange rate vine. So why not just let the man be himself, and see what happened, and will happen? No preconceptions about his no-harm harmonica-blowing, just let it all unfold in real net time and spy the contours of the bigger picture further on down the TikTok-illuminated vine.

Anyway.

I was looking very much forward to seeing Welles live in Glasgow, no matter what the weight and heft of anybastard else’s expectations of him. Roped a pal in, who ultimately couldn’t come – nae luck, Chris! – and set out at the mercy of the local bus disservice, nearly missing my train through to Glasgow from Kilmarnock, as usual. 

I exited Glasgow Central into the city. My phone decided to Google Map me to oblivion and back because it didn’t like the rain on its cracked face. Bloody huffy prima donna technoshite! Christmas lights vivid neon reflections wiggle-rippled in the rain, and I was dodging dark clothes and umbrellas and food delivery outtatheway e-bike kamikazis and weekend warrior drunks and heel-tottering pheremone-spilling dollybirds and scran tanners and tragic soaking homeless life victims and snooty welldressed wine bar loiterers and frowning supermarket security guards and narroweyed theft chance seekers, slipping and sliding along, twelve-minute-walk puddlesplashing my way to the Old Fruitmarket, a venue I had never been at before. The line outside told me I had the right place, and never mind the faulty bloody malfunctioning phone.

Wasn’t long before I got in. still had to wrestle with my phone to get my ticket from my Yahoo account, cursing it as the front of the line came up, having to stand off and finally – finally! – get the ticket to come up on the Ticketmaster app. Made me miss simple paper ticketing, and made me think of the time I went to see PJ Harvey in Glasgow in the 90s on a snowy night without a ticket. I walked up to the door of the venue…to find a ticket somebody had dropped right in the doorway. Fond recollection, rendered obsolete by the ravages of time and technology waiting for no man, but a sweet memory nonetheless. In a blood red dress and fine throaty form, Harvey was a devastating vena cava diva that night.

Finally got in, starving. I hadn’t had time to eat before I left, and asked a helpful young Asian woman on the door if they served food. She said no, and I told her that I needed to get something to eat before my stomach started growling so loud it got me kicked out of the gig during an acoustic set for heckling! She chuckled and pointed me to a nearby scran shack. I had an hour until Welles came onstage, so I managed to get something to eat and get back to the venue in plenty of time. Knew it might be a bit more difficult to get to stand near the front, but that was alright. I just went on in and wormed my way into the heart of the crowd. Hadn’t missed anything, there was no support, but who cares about watching any support band anyway?

CONTINUED IN PART 2 (OF 3) HERE:

https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2025/12/apopcalypse-now-jesse-welles-old_01439379694.html