As an American, my understanding of the U.K.’s Black Country culture is limited. By way of the most rudimentary musical education, one can blurt out facts about Liverpool, the town that birthed the Beatles and brought the influence of African-American music to the U.K. through its international ports. Or we’ll know Manchester by way of the Smiths, or a romanticized obsession with the Britpop battle of Blur and Oasis. London is replete with names on the tips of all our tongues, from the Rolling Stones to Pink Floyd to the Clash. Each of these bands have offered us a taste from across the pond of what life must be like “over there” — the political climate, the sense of humor, the accents. But when it comes to the working class, once industrial hubs of Black Country and Birmingham — the Midlands — it’s a bit of a blank spot when it comes to an immediate reference, save for Black Sabbath.
Nestled in the corner of a Camden pub last week, I got my Midlands education, taught by Big Special, the buzzy post-punk duo who herald from those so often overlooked areas. And not unlike their music, Joe Hicklin and Cal Moloney didn’t stand on a soapbox — rather, they spoke from the heart, helping me to understand their story with honesty and powerfully emotional cadence. Though their debut single, released only a year ago, Big Special have been a long time coming. It is born from years of hard work and dedication to craft, over which they’ve kept their heads down, and feet firmly planted. Realism is key to the Big Special narrative, which details the pain felt by working-class life, and the heartbreaking, frustrating experience of being a community cast aside by their own country.
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The album, which was spawned during lockdown, and took four years to come to fruition, leans into what life’s been like on the most personal level. It flits from aggressive, almost DIY-sounding punk, driven by Moloney’s drum kit, to Hicklin’s blues-rock crooning — however, it’s the vocalist’s breaks, where he shifts from song into spoken word, that is the grounding force behind what makes the band’s sound so surprisingly big, and undeniably special. “There are times people think we’re trying to make a big political statement, but we aren’t necessarily,” Hicklin says to me, enthusiastically, across the table. “We’re not telling anyone to do anything, or think anything. This album is just about a normal experience — and normal experience is inherently political. We’re just showing exactly what we’re going through.” Though such specifics to another’s story, from across an ocean, is prone to sound like fiction — through Big Special’s raw sentimentality and audibly deep belief and pride in their roots, the message becomes universally felt.
Whether it’s playing through a cassette tape, or from the stage itself, the duo is driving home a point we can all relate to — as humans, as a society, we separate ourselves, divide, and cast aside our equals. Perhaps, it’s time to rise up.
How did you two first meet, and when did you start making music together?
CAL MOLONEY: We met in a music course in college, in the center of Birmingham. We got paired together and just cracked on as best mates, really. We were young, and it was the first time either of us connected with someone creatively — properly. Before that, Joe was a solo artist for ages — and I was in a couple of shit bands that never got past the practice.
Did you two grow up in the same area?
MOLONEY: Similar. Not too far away, around the borders of Birmingham. There’s always been a bit of a rivalry between the Black Country and Birmingham. It’s all silly regional stuff.
JOE HICKLIN: We both grew up in both areas, and I always worked in pubs around Black Country.
So would you identify as someone from Black Country or Birmingham?
MOLONEY: West Midlands. We’re trying to get rid of all that bollocks because it’s not even serious. It’s just another way people separate themselves from each other. We like to do that as a society.
HICKLIN: Yeah, I was in Birmingham all the time, because you could do gigs there — there was no music scene where I was.
As an American, I have to admit I really don’t know much about the cultural regional divides in the U.K. Everyone I talk to gives me a dose of their home base history, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten. I just talked to Liam Gallagher, so I’m most recently tapped in with Manchester.
MOLONEY: That’s part of the mindset. A Manc is always very, very, very proud that they’re from Manchester. They’re cool kids in the parkas, with the cool bands and cool accent, and everybody likes them. And that’s the case for almost everywhere but the Midlands. Even when it comes to major acts on tour — everyone always goes to the north, and the south divide. There’s more people in the Midlands than any other region — we’re the second biggest city in the U.K. It’s where the industrial revolution started, and it’s a historically important town. But over generations of walking uphill, there’s an inherent self-hatred, self-deprecating sensibility about Midlanders that’s been passed down. Sure, we’ve got Sabbath, and that is our thing. But if you go into Birmingham, there’s very little self-confidence about. That’s why you don’t see as much representation of Midlands bands in music.
HICKLIN: They’re not very accepting of their own culture in Birmingham.
MOLONEY: I live down south now — and you can’t walk through Bristol without Bristol telling you how much it loves Bristol. But when people hear the Midlands accent, I’m immediately spoken down to. I was in the rehearsal studio doing some drums recently when a guy walked in, so I said, “There’s a fresh kettle on.” And the first thing out of his mouth was, “Did you know that the Midlands accent has been voted the worst accent in the world?” Why the fuck would you say that?
HICKLIN: We’re the joke of this country, but we’re historically one of the most important parts of the country.
MOLONEY: The point of Big Special is to say that attitude is all nonsense. We’re a small country, and it’s similar for everyone, especially across the working classes. It’s not that different regionally. That’s why our album is called POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES, even though it’s very specifically about where we grew up — it’s about the docks in Liverpool, it’s about Slough, it’s about fucking everywhere. It’s about all of these places, these towns that relied on industry until industry fucked up.
It’s interesting because that experience, universally, has proven to produce important music — particularly emotional, driven, vocal music. In America, I think of Detroit, another forgotten industrial capital, out of which we’ve gotten vital techno, rap, and hardcore scenes.
MOLONEY: It all comes out of the struggling, working-class musician, even if the music they’re making isn’t necessarily political. The fact that they’re making music at all is inherently political. Society wants us to be factory workers and 9 to 5ers.
So, when did you decide to start this project and bring this narrative forward through music?
HICKLIN: I was playing solo — I’d gotten into old blues music and old folk music, things one person on a guitar can do. I did that for years, because the thing I could always do is just take myself on the bus and go do a gig. I did that right up until the pandemic, the solo stuff, but at that time I was falling out of love with it. I’d been stuck to it for so long.
With your solo music, were you touching on similar, personal topics than you two are now?
HICKLIN: It was still very personal, but I didn’t do the spoken-word stuff. It was one of the big things I wanted to do — but that was a confidence issue, due to what we’re saying about the regional issues, and insecurity about my accent. It was in lockdown, really, where I read a lot of poetry, written in a dialect that inspired me to just push my anxieties down and just give it a go. That was the Big Special idea. Then we got together, didn’t we? And took it from there, starting with the album.
MOLONEY: When Joe first called me, I’d just gotten a proper full-time job as a van driver. I wasn’t in any creative projects at the time, and when we first reached out, he didn’t have anything concrete in front of him, so I was like, “Nah, no.” We’re a two-hour drive away from each other, and getting older. To start a band? I don’t want to be that dad in a denim jacket in the pub. But then he sent me a raw demo of “This Here Water,” one of our singles. On all his old stuff he’d be singing, and you can’t hear an accent. But on this, with the poetry and spoken word — another mate of ours, Elliot from Midlands, says he could smell the Midlands. Hearing that in the music, it made me feel proud.
Everything we’d done before felt like a stepping stone towards doing this. The meaning of it all, it’s dark, personal — but then on the other side is the craft of it, and that’s where you can have some fun and get in the studio and bring your ideas to life. It was a lot of messing around and figuring things out along the way.
It seems like that kind of improvisation and rewriting the recipe is all the more possible when you’re doing something that is truly personal. The expectations for the project are lessened — it’s just your own thing that’s not produced to do certain numbers or satisfy some superior force.
MOLONEY: Since I met him at college, Joe’s ability to put his personal perspective on the world into his songs is what made me want to work with him. Everything he does has always been very raw. It’s why we’ve drawn closer over the years. The one rule? Just write with honesty, and then the rest comes along with it.
HICKLIN: Write what you know. It’s just that, really.
You’d think that by being hyperspecific about your experience in Black Country, you might alienate someone like me, an American listener. But because of that level of honesty, which is definitely felt, it’s easy to relate, no matter where you’re from or your experience. What separates me, often, is a song with traditional pop structure, telling a generalized, straightforward story. It’s meant to be universally relatable, but comes off anonymous.
HICKLIN: That’s what I said, too. Sharing an experience isn’t relating to an experience emotionally. Being specific, personal — that’s what shows that you’re human, and that’s what others see themselves in.
So you wrote the album back in 2021. Now it’s coming out, in 2024. Having written something that’s super close to the heart, about potential pain points, what has it been like working on those same songs for years?
HICKLIN: The album came after — when you’re in that depressive cycle, you’re not right in the head to write or create. You need to go through it to get the perspective to be able to work on it — and working on it gives it a reason to have happened as well. The silver lining is you’ve made something out of it that wasn’t there before. Then you put it all down, and get into a studio to make this big, beautiful thing out of your experience. After that, we get to take it to the stage in front of a bunch of people who can relate to it — and we’re all having fun and having a drink and singing along… So it becomes the opposite of what the original experience was.
MOLONEY: Having people singing the lyrics back to us and reacting — we’ve seen full-grown men crying in the front row of the audience. It’s incredible. You can see that they’re feeling the exact same. Like you said, it can translate across barriers. When I initially wanted to get on board, I was not sure people who weren’t Midlands would get the slang or understand the lingo. But we just got back from South America two months ago, touring non-English-speaking countries, and you can see the energy. They can understand what you’re saying, on a deeper level. A lot of the hip-hop we listen to from the States, we don’t understand the references, we don’t understand every lyric, but we’re massive fans.
HICKLIN: Our music is about a working-class life, really. That exists everywhere you go.
MOLONEY: Yeah, exactly. And I suppose the good thing is that even if people can’t relate to the narrative — hopefully at least it’ll give them a bit of empathy toward other perspectives. I’m not saying our music does that, but just art in general.
Wherever you are, we’re all living in divided countries. That’s definitely heard on your album.
MOLONEY: We’ve had a lot of regional disputes without the realization that it’s all exactly the same. We’re such a condensed country — there’s the idea of, “I’m from here, and that is important, while you’re just 20 minutes from us.” In those 20 minutes, the accent changes. That sort of face-value difference drives people to separate themselves into these little groups. You’re still grafting, I’m still grafting, we’re almost in the same position — it’s just we’re looking at this differently.
HICKLIN: That’s also why the title, POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES, is a bit vague. That’s the whole point of it. I’m singing about me — but if I’m doing that, I’m singing about you as well. My town had a place in history and then became a bit of a ghost town where people struggle for work or choice in general. That’s hundreds of towns all across the country, and places all over the world. It’s a repercussion of capitalism taking industry away and moving it to cheaper countries where they do slave labor, sweatshops and shit.
How have people been responding to the album?
MOLONEY: Really well. I wanted to say it all with poetic symbolism and craft, in my own way — but also allow people to get to where we were coming from and the core meaning of it. Ultimately, it’s whatever you take from it, as a listener — but more people have got it straight away than I thought. Today, on the other side of these four years, and the project, we’re finally able to see the response to it. We’re finally able to play it in a room — and that’s something we’re not used to, and it’s wild. We’re at the venues, still getting mad excited about it.
HICKLIN: This last week has felt like such a step up. In December, we were selling out 100- or 200-cap rooms, which led to 400, 500. It’s a big change. I feel like the nerves are different now, the crowd feels different — everything feels different. Especially with the album out now.
You should hold on to that feeling! So what’s next?
MOLONEY: We’ve already got a bunch of demos for the next album. What makes the biggest difference going forward is that with the first album, we actually built our sound from the ground up, without ever playing a gig. Now we’re coming in knowing our dynamic range — so we intend on continuing to push ourselves, with the emotion and with the sound. Up until this album, Joe had never read poetry in front of people, and I’d never played with electronics and a drum kit. Now, it’s time to really explore the directions we’ve been going in. And, of course, take things further.
