West Midlands duo keep it real at Leeds' Key Club
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| Photo: Isaac Watson |
My only previous Key Club visit was a raucous Saturday afternoon IDLES appearance at a Live @ Leeds festival many moons ago that practically razed the place to the ground.
No pressure then for West Midland duo BIG SPECIAL whose razor-sharp kitchen-sink-full-of-Special-Brew single ‘Shithouse’’ first piqued my interest. With debut long player ‘Post Industrial Hometown Blues’ gleaming on the shelves and a 30-date sell out UK tour underway, things seem to be happening for Walsall based frontman Joe Hicklin and his batshit Brummie mate from college, drummer Callum Moloney.
Seemingly as mad as a box of frogs yet crafting humorous hard-hitting nuggets about class, drudgery and depression, comparisons of BIG SPECIAL with Yard Act, The Streets and Sleaford Mods are perhaps inevitable yet misguided. The fact every life is lived differently, the downtrodden subject material drawing a well-worn path going back as far as the 1960s in exactly the same way as a million love songs contain the same number of different perspectives.
Tonight the two are on fine form, Family favourites ‘Shithouse’, new single ‘Desperate Breakfast’ and ‘This Here Aint water’ are a revelation although the Hi-NRG proto goth of ‘Trees’ is my pick of the bunch, Hicklin’s baritone/spoken word hybrid, complemented by a backing track powered by Moloney’s in-between bouts of deafening don’t fuck with me drumming seems to work just fine. Arguably, Sleafords’ refreshingly anti-rockist live performances have helped pave the way for like-minded acts who don’t want to (or maybe can’t afford to anymore) take a full live band on the road with them. For me everyone’s better for that, despite the rantings of certain idiots in the music industry who are probably too thick to get it, if the tunes are worthy of an audience, who cares how they’re delivered?
Bostin’.
Words by Michael Price
BIG SPECIAL official