"It was like holding in a big s**t..."
Big Special's Joe Hicklin on new album 'National Average'.
Black Country post punk duo Big Special dropped their new album ‘National Average’ without any fanfare earlier this month, but the lack of pre-release hype hasn’t stopped it racking up a cluster of four and five star reviews - just like their debut ‘Post Industrial Hometown Blues’ which came out last year.
To my ears, the new record sounds funkier and more danceable than its predecessor, whilst maintaining a thread of darkly comical social commentary via the defiantly West Midlands tones of vocalist Joe Hicklin.
I hear the outsiderish lineage of The Nightingales and The Courtesy Group in their dystopian ‘not quite pop’ tunes, but as the words slide over layers of synths and loops, there’s more than a nod to Sleaford Mods and Benefits as well.
Either way, it’s a unique sound, both soulful and abrasive. Hicklin is quick to pay credit to his accomplice, drummer Callum Moloney and studio guru Richard Wilks. To mark the new release, I caught up with Joe for my Brum Radio show. Here are a few edited highlights…
AG: ‘Post Industrial Hometown Blues’ was a great record. As a fan I was waiting for the next one, and the first I heard of it was via an advert at my local railway station on the Cross City Line [in Birmingham]. Was I missing something, or had it really been kept under wraps until then?. The way albums are generally released, especially in this age of streaming, is that you put a single out, then another one, and when you're up to about eight, you say, ‘here's our new album.’ And there might only be two or three tracks people haven't heard, but you’d thrown it all against the wall in one big go.
JH: We brought it all at the same time. We said six hours before it was out, ‘we’re dropping an album’. It’s funny. There have been three or four surprise album drops [by other bands] since we since we did it. Maybe there is a bit of a thing going on. We thought, if we put it out like this, it will be judged as what it is, like a film rather than a TV series. No one has heard anything off it. No one's heard about it. So they'll start it, track one, and hopefully listen to all the way through and it'll be judged as as such.
AG: Was there a discussion about whether to release it track by track or or just throw it all out there?
JH: When we made the album, it was only six months after we did the first one, so it was like, ‘if we start another campaign now, it's just going to be like, a fart in the wind’. Because we've just been around all the avenues, we've been talking about Big Special with the first album, so they're not going to have us do it again.
AG: Do you mean in terms of media, radio stations, interviews and so on?
JH: Yeah, PR stuff …with people's attention span, if we're popping up like we were for the first album, doing it straight away again, it might be a bit boring, you know? I mean, it was quite exciting to just go, ‘guys, here’s an album.’ Whereas it was a bit stressful holding it in. We kept saying it was like holding in a big sh*t. (Laughs)
AG: ‘Thin Horses’ is possibly the best track on the album and it's right at the end. That goes against what I understand to be the consensus in the streaming age, which is that you put all your best stuff first, because people will lose attention.
JH: I think that mentality is making a playlist, but we put it out to be judged as an album. We like to think we're an album band - that's where we're at in our heads. And we're crafting this thing…once you put it all together, it's a thing of its own. So I try and find a narrative through the sound. It goes up and down like a movie would… even though it's not a concept [album].
It starts somewhere and it ends somewhere. It's like, if I want someone to sit down for 45 minutes, give them the dynamic… it's like a journey, I think it's nice to start in one mood and end in another. Even starting the album with ‘The Mess’ - it’s what follows from ‘Dig’ at the end of the first album. If this was a sequel, which I suppose it is, whoever the character was walking through the first album, could walk into the second album and and go through that as well.
AG: You supported the Pixies on their recent tour. You’re touring a lot.
JH: We’ve been busy boys. I am ready for a bit of a lie down. We've pretty much been flat out since a couple of months before the first album; just gone straight through now for nearly two years, touring and stuff like that. So I'm looking forward to a little bit of downtime. But there's this second album coming out. That definitely gives us another buzz of excitement. It's been really nice playing new stuff live, and mixing the two albums together to create different set lists And it's nice to be busy doing our thing. I'm happy for it, man. And my only goal now is just not to go back to work - just keep keep it going.
Big Special are touring extensively in the UK and Europe over the next few months. Dates here.
Listen to the full interview here on Brum Radio.