Things the West Midlands has given 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 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, Postindustrial Hometown Blues, 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 Queen, Free 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 Bob Dylan,” says a still-awed Moloney. They tried playing together, but it never took off so they went their separate ways.
The onset of covid changed everything. Having gone through what he describes as “a bad depression”, Hicklin knew he needed to change things up. “I just put down the guitar and focused on the poetry,” he says, of the spoken-word part of the band’s sound.
He called his old friend Moloney to play on the songs he was working on with producer/unofficial third member Michael Clarke. Moloney was initially unconvinced about stepping back into a band situation, with all the drudgery it entails, but an early demo of howl-of-pain-in-a-wind-tunnel single This Here Ain’t Water convinced him. That and the fact that Hicklin had finally stopped trying to disguise his native accent.
“I just got a clear vision of where we were going,” says Moloney. “I could hear it was a real West Midlands thing. That was important to us both."
"We’re from the West Midlands, and the place is in our bones, but you don’t have to be from here to relate to what we’re singing about,” says Hicklin. “Anger, frustration, humour. Those emotions are universal.”
Postindustrial Hometown Blues is available now via So Recordings.
