BIG SPECIAL @Key Club, Leeds, May 8th 2024, LIVE REVIEW

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.  

John Robb - Do You Believe in the Power of Rock & Roll? Live from The Old Woollen, Leeds, 28/4/2024

Ever wish you’d been born ten years earlier? An unusual phenomenon perhaps but while I’ve got you, please allow me a moment’s elaboration. In my case, emerging a decade sooner would have seen my formative years immersed in the nation’s Beatlemania thrall instead of the fab four as a fading memory, my early teens coinciding with glam, my late teens punk and post punk instead of hair metal…..bah! 

Fat Dog @The Fulford Arms, York, May 6th 2024 (LIVE REVIEW)

Credit: Tom White

London quintet Fat Dog have bemused and frustrated some dull press types because they can't be neatly popped into their tidy little boxes of shiny new bands. London quintet Fat Dog have outraged some fans of other bands when they supported certain acts on tour recently and basically blew their headliners off the stage. London quintet Fat Dog have been causing quite a bit of a stir it’s fair to say. Is it a serious jaunt into the world of rock and roll or are they just having a bit of a laugh (at our expense?). I don’t really know, and don’t really care. It’s an infectious racket and it needs to be heard. 

Frank Turner, @Boom Leeds, May 4th 2024 (LIVE REVIEW)

Frank Turner is fresh-faced, fully charged and (importantly to the bigger picture) climbing on to Boom’s tiny stage on time as he prepares to play his third show already today, and its only 4pm. He’s attempting a world record for playing the most gigs in different cities in 24 hours to raise support and awareness of grassroots music venues. It’s a tall order which will take him from Liverpool to Southampton in a London e-taxi, a trip of roughly 500 miles, with a final show at noon tomorrow. 

Big Special 'Postindustrial Hometown Blues' (ALBUM REVIEW)

The debut album from Birmingham duo BIG SPECIAL is ferociously ambitious, to the point that their identity is about as fixed as the British weather. This all starts to make sense when vocalist Joe Hicklin waxes lyrical about his influences, which stretch from Jimi Hendrix to bluesman Robert Johnson to country maverick William Elliott Whitmore – not to mention the novels of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski – but bringing them all together coherently is a trick he and Callum Moloney are still in the process of mastering. Not least because somewhere in there they’ve stuck a stick of dynamite up a synthesiser and given Moloney free rein to work through some stuff on the drums.