Things the West Midlands has given the world: and , Steel Pulse and The Specials, Duran Duran, ...
And let’s not forget the Industrial Revolution. But does the place get the respect it deserves? “No way,” says Big Special frontman Joe Hicklin. “It’s the most important industrial powerhouse in the country, if not the world, but creatively and culturally we’re downtrodden.
We’re taught to be ashamed of our accent and where we’re from. We’re not the north, we’re not the south, we’re the forgotten middle.” Hicklin and drummer Callum Moloney (Birmingham-born but based in Bristol for the last 10 years) are waging a two-man war on that perception.
The duo’s electrifying debut album, , fuses together the blues, hip-hop and rock, switching between foundry-like intensity and moments of graceful desolation. But it’s Hicklin’s lyrics – alternately vivid, bleak and funny, sometimes sung with knock-you-back-on-your-feet soul power, sometimes spoken in an undiluted Black Country accent – that give Big Special their emotional engine and their sense of place It’s been a long journey to get here. The two were thrown together on a BTEC music course more than a decade ago.
Hicklin, who went from listening to , and Hendrix to original blues masters such as Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and Son House, was trying to forge a career on the local folk/blues/Americana circuit. “He was like this fucking Walsall ,” says a still-awed Moloney. They tried playing tog.