Big Special – National Average

Life comes at you fast. Just ask Big Special. On the evening of August 9, 2023, the duo – Joe Hicklin and Callum Moloney – walked onstage storied Camden boozer the Dublin Castle for their first headlining gig in the capital. The duo had only a single release to their name: the majestic, cathartic, existential bellow of ‘Shithouse’, 7-inches of which were posted to fans on their mailing list that month. Their acclaimed debut album, 2024’s Postindustrial Hometown Blues, was still just a pile of voice- memo demos, drum patterns and couplets scribbled in Hicklin’s notebooks, nothing yet committed to tape. The Big Special story had barely begun.

Fast-forward 20 or so months later, however, and Hicklin and Moloney are again onstage, this time at the O2 Forum Kentish Town, sweat-drenched and bathing in the rapture as the biggest headline show of their career so far draws to a triumphant close. They’re looking out at 2,300 or so fans, hands aloft, a fraction of the following that have been drawn by the righteous missives and unflinching poetry of Postindustrial Hometown Blues, by these anthems of struggle and darkness and honesty. Alongside the screams and applause, the immortal words of David Byrne – “Well, how did I get here?” – are likely ringing in their ears. As Moloney notes, the Forum is only a kilometre walk away from the Dublin Castle. But the distance Big Special have covered between those two shows is far greater than can be plotted on a map.