Things the West Midlands gave to the world: Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, Steel Pulse and The Specials, Duran Duran, Napalm Death… And let’s not forget the Industrial Revolution. But does this place get the respect it deserves?
“Absolutely not,” says Big Special frontman Joe Hicklin. “We are the most important industrial nation in the country, if not the world, but we are oppressed creatively and culturally. We are taught to be ashamed of our accent and our origins. We are not the north, we are not the south, we are the forgotten middle.”
Hicklin and drummer Callum Moloney (Birmingham born, Bristol resident for 10 years) wage a two-man war against that perception. The duo’s electrifying debut album, Post-industrial hometown bluesblends blues, hip-hop and rock, alternating between foundry-like intensity and moments of graceful bleakness. But it’s Hicklin’s lyrics – by turns vibrant, dark and funny, sometimes sung with devastating soul power, sometimes spoken with a pristine black country accent – that give Big Special its emotional drive and sense of place.
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It’s been a long road to get here. The pair were brought together on a BTEC music course over a decade ago. Hicklin, who moved on from Queen, Free and Hendrix to the original blues masters like Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and Son House, was trying to build a career on the local folk/blues/Americana scene. “He was like that bloody Walsall Bob Dylan,” says a still-awestruck Moloney. They tried playing together but it never really took off, so they went their separate ways.
The Covid outbreak changed everything. After going through what he describes as a “severe depression,” Hicklin knew he had to make a change. “I just put the guitar down and focused on poetry,” he says of the spoken word part of the band’s sound.
He called his old friend Moloney to ask him to play on the songs he was working on with producer and unofficial third member Michael Clarke. Moloney was initially reluctant to return to a band, with all the drudgery that entails, but an early demo of the single “Howl-of-Pain-in-a-Wind-Tunnel” This is not water convinced him. That and the fact that Hicklin had finally stopped hiding his accent.
“I just had a clear idea of where we were going,” says Moloney. “I could hear that it was a real West Midlands thing. That was important to both of us. We’re from the West Midlands and we have that place in our bones, but you don’t have to be from here to understand what we’re singing about,” says Hicklin. “Anger, frustration, humor. Those emotions are universal.”
“Postindustrial Hometown Blues” is available now via So Recordings.
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