BIG SPECIAL: “We never set out to be the next Robbie Williams”

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From the Black Country to the world stage, BIG SPECIAL’s debut album ‘POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES’ is a raw and honest reflection of the band’s journey and the universality of working-class struggles.

Words: Ciaran Picker.
Photos: Derek Bremner.

Black Country punk poets BIG SPECIAL are a bit of an anomaly in today’s music business. Separately and together, the lads have been making music for the last sixteen years, so they know better than anyone that it’s not every day you feel like you’re on to a winner. Since the release of their debut single ‘SHITHOUSE’ almost a year ago to the day, life’s gone just a little bit weird for Joe Hicklin and Cal Moloney. Their debut album, ‘POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES’ isn’t some flash in the pan; it’s the peak of decades of dedication and tireless work that now sees them ready to not only take on the world but take it over completely.

“We keep catching each other’s eye and going ‘What are we doing?’” Joe grins. “I’ll be sat on the sofa, look at my phone and go, ‘Oh, I’m on the cover of Rolling Stone!’” Cal agrees. “It’s the first time we feel that we’ve made a step on the right path for a long time.”

Just home from tour, fans across the country turned out in their droves to watch the band. “We never thought we’d get out of the Birmingham scene, to be honest,” Joe reveals. “Like, people in the South understanding what we’re on about just never occurred to me.”

“I never thought we’d reach Sheffield,” Cal laughs.

Even more baffling for the boys was the reaction from fans during their support slot for emo-rock behemoths Placebo across South America. “We were in an airport in Mexico, and this guy came up to us and asked us to sign stuff,” Cal remembers. “I was just thinking, ‘What the absolute fuck is going on?!’” 

“We got recognised in a Brazilian mall too,” Joe giggles, “but then you come back and walk around Brownhills Market, and nobody knows who you are.”

It’s impossible to separate BIG SPECIAL and their work from the wider national and global context in which it was built. For Joe, it was a shimmer of light in an otherwise pretty bleak period during the pandemic. “I sort of fell out of love with music; just as lockdown hit, I was ready to start releasing stuff, so it was like, ‘Fucks’ sake, now the world’s shut down to stop me from making music!’”

“Over the last week, I’ve seen probably six or seven grown men crying at our gigs”

Cal Moloney

At this moment, Cal came through with the idea that would ultimately morph into BIG SPECIAL, giving Joe the opportunity to get onstage and finally perform the words that he’d been harbouring since his teenage years. This time, though, he was afforded the opportunity to not only show off his full range of blues-rock vocals but to look deeper into the band’s own local history, shining a light on an accent that is as distinct as it is hidden from the wider music industry.

“Lockdown gave me the chance to focus on rhythmic and rhyming poetry,” Joe recalls, “and I stumbled on Liz Berry. She’s a poet from the Black Country who writes in our dialect, and it made me think about using that a bit more, then suddenly this BIG SPECIAL thing came through, and it made it all make sense.”

BIG SPECIAL gave the boys an outlet to combine their tried and tested methods with new ideas that kept them fresh and interesting, Joe’s exploration of his own voice through spoken word blends with the bluesy, Americana roots of his previous work. Meanwhile, Cal has been able to rejuvenate his “caveman drummer” status by experimenting with triggers and, in his words, “all this new-fangled technology”.

The more traditional elements of BIG SPECIAL’s sound allow them to tell stories from across the ages, reliving tales from their childhood and beyond, bringing to life the characters and images that surrounded them as they grew up in the West Midlands. Thankfully, though, they aren’t stuck in their ways, altering how they work to make the most of the sound they create. 

In an industry that benefits those brave enough to innovate, BIG SPECIAL are proof that sticking to your guns is always worth it. “When you start playing around at the edges of punk, especially as a two-piece, I was paranoid that you’d get some cranky old bastard going, ‘Where’s the bass player? Where’s the guitarist? This is wank!’” Cal chuckles. He continues, “At the start, I know I was so quiet on the drums to not get in the way of Joe’s words, but now we’ve done about 70 gigs, we’re starting to get the hang of it, I think.”

Now, 70 gigs might sound like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s hardly any at all. That makes Joe’s next statement even more impressive. “I can’t remember where we were, but a guy came up to us at the end of a show and said: ‘I’ve been going to gigs for sixty years, and that’s the first time I’ve cried’.” 

Cal nods, “Over the last week, I’ve seen probably six or seven grown men crying at our gigs. Hopefully, that means we’re doing something right!”

“Joe challenged himself to write a two-minute banger, and within about five minutes, he’d done it!”

Cal Moloney 

BIG SPECIAL represent all that music should be, going back to basics and creating art that is raw and confronting, with a big heart and even bigger soul. This comes through potently in the songwriting but is equally clear in the way that they treat their ever-growing fanbase, fighting against the profiteering in the industry.

“We always have to do the QVC section of the gig, where we direct people towards the merch stand if they can afford it,” Cal says candidly. “But we want to keep gig tickets and album costs low; we’ve all been to shows where artists are trying to flog you a ticket for £80, then £50 for a shirt or a vinyl – at that point, it’s not about the fan anymore.”

Being relatively old hands in the game – although ones who are still, to quote Cal, “young, hip, and cool” – the boys have seen the industry change more rapidly than probably at any other point in history, with the rise of social media again jarring with the overall ethos that BIG SPECIAL represents. “I don’t wanna be too down on [social media] because it clearly works for some people,” Cal states. “We’re on TikTok and whatever, but it starts to verge into that whole capitalist ‘click me, like me, buy me, sell me’ bollocks. The album is about authenticity; we don’t wanna be Instagram influencers or TikTok stars.”

It’s that very authenticity that keeps people from all parts of the world, from all walks of life, coming back to BIG SPECIAL. Good news, then, that three years after their inception, the band’s debut album, ‘POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES’, is finally out in the world. 

A fifteen-song masterpiece, it delicately deals with the vulnerabilities of working-class life, taking the minute details of growing up in the West Midlands and turning it into an immensely relatable and realistic picture of 21st-century Britain. From the outset, the boys give you a bird’s eye view of what it’s like to grow in an environment built to keep you down. 

Somewhat understandably, the lads have been widely defined as a punk outfit, with the bold, shouty energy of ‘SHITHOUSE’, alongside the visceral imagery of ‘BUTCHER’S BIN’. As with much of today’s musical discourse, though, that broad-stroke approach not only ignores the nuance of the sound on display but actively underplays the technical brilliance of the album’s themes, influences, and atmosphere.

“I’m happy to be unspecified,” Joe smiles. “Some of my favourite music is shouty, punk, nail your colours to the mast music, but I don’t think that’s our band.” 

Cal agrees, “If you were searching BIG SPECIAL on Google, we’d be under the ‘Other’ category, and I love that.” 

This sparks a memory of one label bestowed on the lads by an American institution, which sums up the point pretty perfectly: “My favourite one was in the US where we were described as a hip-hop duo!” 

The lads then rattle off a list of made-up sub-genres that they’ve described themselves as – geezcore, post-bloke, pubcore, ramble-punk – that all basically stab at the heart of what the band is actually about.

“It’s a message that exists out of time because if you asked any working-class person, they’d tell you it’s been going on for decades”

Joe Hicklin

BIG SPECIAL are more an ethos than a band. The project is made up of equal parts vulnerability, depression, exasperation, hope, joy, and laughter.

“All of the artists I’ve been most drawn to have created a unique centre and built their own specific voice,” Joe reveals. As a kid, he was attracted to the wonders of Tom Waits, Jimi Hendrix, and Freddie Mercury, but also to the gritty realism of authors Charles Bukowski and Hunter S Thompson. Through these heroes, he discovered his musical talent and learned how to avoid the pitfalls that brought down some of those who came before.

“If you look at someone like Bukowski, he had his own way of reporting what he saw,” Joe posits. “But towards the end, that eye became a bit cynical – when do you fall for your own myth and start to force description to fit that voice? We’ve tried to find a balance.”

The lyrical content of ‘POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES’ strikes exactly this balance, with decades of poetry melded together to create a greyscale collage that provides the cinematic backdrop to the journey through BIG SPECIAL’s native landscape. None of this detracts from the sonics, though, with Cal’s drumming dictating the tempo and providing the frame upon which their story shines.

“It’s deliberately a big album,” Cal levels. “We kept it at fifteen because it gave us more time to direct emotion and sit with feelings. There’s a movie feel to the record, and we didn’t want to rush the story.” 

Joe sniggers, remembering conversations from the studio. “We’d be sitting there for days twiddling with top lines or whatever going, ‘No because if the sound was a story, it would go up here, then down there, and blah blah blah’.”

Nothing about this record is easy. No corners were cut, nothing has been done half-heartedly or rushed to a deadline; it is a project that wasn’t to be released until it was ready. “We had a finished version about two years ago,” says Cal. “But then we took it on the road, and we let our growth inform the growth of the record. It reached the point where we were down to the last few hours, and this guitar line just fell out of Joe’s fingers, and we were like, ‘That’s got to be in the album!’”

Just as the record’s subject matter is organic and natural, so the writing process took on the form of a living, breathing organism, coming back to the duo’s determination to just let things happen. Where parts of the album were wrapped within five minutes, others were the product of decades of grafting. “There’s no chicken or the egg with it,” Joe says. “Just like we never sat down and said, ‘These are our influences, this is the band we’re gonna be’. We haven’t got one particular method.”

Cal agrees, “Some stuff comes from loops or jams we’ve done, and lyrically, it’s from a pile of lines Joe’s had for years that have fitted with an idea. I remember Joe writing ‘TREES’ – he challenged himself to write a two-minute banger, and within about five minutes, he’d done it! But then there are other times where you lose days of sleep over one beat that people probably won’t even hear.”

Every little detail, both sonically and lyrically, has a meaning. Just like the ecosystem in the postindustrial town that the guys created for the record, if one thing doesn’t work, the whole hierarchy tumbles. In this way, the album is elevated from just another punk record into bona fide art.

Much like classic Hollywood tales of vulnerability – see It’s A Wonderful Life, Little Women, Finding Nemo – ‘POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES’ sees our hero spiral across the first half of the album. Once Earth-shattering opener ‘BLACK COUNTRY GOTHIC’ sets the scene, one of misplaced nostalgia in a town as covered with filth and delinquency as ever, we zero in on our tragic hero. Through their experience of self-doubt in ‘I MOCK JOGGERS’, of unemployment and hopelessness in beautifully bare ‘MY SHAPE (BLOCKING THE LIGHT)’, and even of staring death in the face in ‘BLACK DOG/WHITE HORSE’, it becomes clear that this town is one where struggle is the order of the day. 

Again, though, this album is all about light and shade, as the halfway point is marked by the starry-eyed wonder of ‘BROADCAST: TIME AWAY’. When asked about the track, Joe reveals, “We put [‘BROADCAST’] in the middle to symbolise the beginning of hope. It’s a song that says, ‘I wanna make something of my life’; it’s looking around you, seeing what’s happening, and making something happen.”

All of the rise and fall, continuing in the second half of the album through the contrasting of tongue-in-cheek mental health anthem ‘DUST OFF/START AGAIN’, what-if sermon ‘MONGREL’, and the longing look back on a life well loved in ‘FOR THE BIRDS’, culminates in the final scene: ‘DiG!’.

For Cal, “‘DiG!’ is basically what we’re all about: it’s not about a genre or fitting into a box; it’s about showing that, at the end of the day, hope is all we have.”

That message is felt immensely personally by Joe, who used his own past dealings with mental health to apply it to the wider context of class struggle, both today and throughout time. “If you look at it, there are three main forms of depression: personal, social, and generational. The whole message is that the past, the present, and the future all inform each other. It’s all different forms of the same shit, and nothing’s changed.”

Both the boys know, though, that this is a struggle that has been going on for centuries and will likely continue for more to come. “The record nearly didn’t come out until next year,” Cal discloses, “but we knew it had to come out now. It’s written about stuff that was relevant three years ago, is still relevant now, and will probably be relevant next year no matter the result of any general fucking election, but you don’t want to be the last ones out the door before it shuts.” 

Joe nods, “All of this would’ve fitted ten years ago, too; it’s a message that exists out of time because if you asked any working-class person, they’d tell you it’s been going on for decades.”

For this reason, it’s somehow still a radical thing for working-class kids to tell their story. “Art from working-class backgrounds is immediately political,” Cal states, “because it’s not from a place where people have that life set out for them.” 

“You’ve got to do whatever makes you happy; the hope’s slim, but it’s the reason you keep going”

Joe Hicklin

Across the record, the idea that the central character might have dreams of a creative career is widely derided, from the degrading claim in ‘BUTCHER’S BIN’ that there’s “no pay for strange labour” through to the dream-crushing “you can’t shine in shit kid/and life ain’t no fucking disco” in ‘SHITHOUSE’. Again, though, this tongue-in-cheek foray is all meant to inspire, not inhibit. 

“Essentially,” Joe surmises, “the whole album is saying, ‘Carry on if you can’. It’s saying, ‘It’s shit, and you’re right to moan’. People are getting blamed when it’s the politicians that should be in the dock, but you’ve got to do whatever makes you happy; the hope’s slim, but it’s the reason you keep going.”

That fact is felt more keenly today than at any point in the last ten years, with the cost-of-living crisis, climate emergency, and overwhelming lack of compassion and humanity from governments across the globe to those in need always coming back to haunt those at the bottom much more than those at the top. 

The album’s title speaks to the very heart of this issue, creating a community under the gospel of ‘POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES’. “The title recognises that there are hundreds of places just like where we grew up,” Joe states. “We wanted to be specific in our writing so we could make relatable art. It’s meant to be a reflection of the personal in the universal; if I’m singing about me, I’m singing about you.”

The deft touch with which the boys have conveyed the exact emotional palette that many urban communities have drawn from across the last century or more has created a fanbase that is not only dedicated to their cause but are ready for what’s coming next. Luckily, the duo are characteristically one step ahead, already planning out how to subvert expectation and keep the hype at fever pitch.

“We’re not a political band, really,” Cal puts it. “We don’t wanna stick to a brand, we’re all about perspectives, so we want to keep true to ourselves, which means releasing something where people go, ‘Jesus, I wasn’t expecting that!’” All of this bleeds back into BIG SPECIAL’s authenticity and genuine soul. “We want to respect the fans enough to keep putting out honest material; we’re gonna keep being respectful by being true to what we do, taking our time, and not predicting anything.”

If the last year has proved anything for BIG SPECIAL, it’s that you can’t predict what comes next, so they’re understandably hesitant to make grand, sweeping prophecies for the future. “You never know, people might not want a second album!” Cal says in a characteristically mischievous way. “To be honest, we’d be doing this anyway; we’d have made it no matter what and probably just put it on Bandcamp and be done with it. We never set out to be the next Robbie Williams, so anything that comes our way we’re grateful for!”

We can be pretty certain of two things. One, people will definitely want a second album. Two, there’s going to be a whole lot more gigging. This summer, they find themselves on the Reading & Leeds lineup, as well as at festivals all over the globe, sharing stages with icons as big as Pixies and Jane’s Addiction. They’ve also got sold-out gigs across the UK, all culminating in their biggest headline to date at London’s Kentish Town Forum in November. A daunting schedule, sure, but one that the pair are more than ready for.

“When we first started out,” Joe recalls, “I was so terrified being on stage without a guitar; Cal always said it was like leading me to the gallows! I loved it after, and now I look forward to it, being able to move around and play with electronics and feel the crowd a bit more.” 

Cal laughs, “I remember him standing there holding on to the mic stand like it was gonna save him from a flood! I know that when I play live, I feel most potently myself; all my anxiety goes away, so I can’t wait to get back out there.”

The immediate future is admittedly less rock’n’roll, with Cal on his way out to mend a fence that keeps falling down (again, “young, hip, and cool”), while Joe’s afternoon promises time spent with dogs and having a smoke. You get the feeling, though, that this is the calm before the storm that could sweep them into that thing known as The Big Time. In case you needed any convincing of that, Cal proudly boasts that Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson described the record as “not shite”, which is the highest praise one could ever hope to achieve. 

Standing on the edge of this next chapter in Joe and Cal’s lives, you get the sense that, deep down, they’re still the Black Country kids listening to Tom Waits in their bedrooms and dreaming of future full of simple pleasures. “All we want to do is make a minimum wage doing what we love, and we’re finally doing that. Anything else is a bonus,” Joe points out. Inadvertently, he’s summed up exactly what BIG SPECIAL represent. Life may not be grand, shiny, and full of gold and silver, but it’s always full so long as you’re doing something worthwhile. BIG SPECIAL are the voice of the nation, and it’s finally being heard.

Taken from the June 2024 issue of Dork. BIG SPECIAL’s debut album ‘POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES’ is out now.

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