Two Thumbs Up: Big Special Brought Proper Punk Back to The Vic

By: Shawna O’Hara, Editor – Photos by James Scully

The British duo captivated the crowd with wit and rhythm ahead of headliners Lambrini Girls

Tuesday night on North Sheffield was as standard as any other, unless you were inside the Vic. There, in seconds, West Midlands duo Big Special transformed the night into an underground punk show, warming the crowd before Lambrini Girls took over the momentum.

Big Special are only frontman Joe Hicklin and drummer/backup singer Callum Moloney, though they commanded the room like a stageful of troupe performers. When they took the stage, Hicklin came out with his hands held high, a thumbs-up for all to see. The crowd ate it up. Over the speakers, a cheeky DJ horn blared a familiar tone. A lone cymbal sat stage right, and he clocked it right away. It would become instrumental – unintentional pun – to his persona that evening.

Hicklin addressed the crowd and drew strong applause, then they began their set with a signature sound: spoken word meets punk percussion. They teased it’d be a political night. While working the crowd, Hicklin used the stage less like a punk frontman and more like a seasoned comedian, walking from side to side, staring into the audience with a glint in his eye and sometimes a grin.

Hicklin and Moloney’s sound is unique, blending spoken word with punk, soul, hip-hop, electronica, and working-class ethos. They’ll keep you on your feet, with spoken word occasionally giving way to Hicklin’s surprisingly deep, velvety vocals that underline their poignant lyrics.

Big Special shouldn’t necessarily work as a live act in the conventional sense, and that’s precisely why they’re so undeniably compelling. They’re two guys: one spends much of the set talking at you, wandering around in a business-casual-esque ‘fit, occasionally whacking the standalone cymbal, while the other pounds the hell out of a drum kit. Yet, the room gets progressively more locked in until everybody is moving together.

Their success is paradoxical: the duo has swagger precisely because they don’t appear remotely interested in looking like they have swagger.

Though they’d been friends for over a decade, Big Special formed in 2020 when Hicklin began writing music during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Moloney, then a wedding band drummer, received a recording from Hicklin to convince him to form a band. The demo, “This Here Ain’t Water”, did its job and Hicklin got his drummer and recording partner. By 2023, the two had become an underground mainstay, releasing the hit “Shithouse” from their 2022 EP Black Country Gothic and, later that year, “Trees”, which launched them deeper into the contradictory underground spotlight. Their music reflects their backgrounds, rooted deeply in class, work, and life in the Midlands. A nod to home is omnipresent throughout the night.

“We are Big Special, and we are not from Chicago!” Hicklin proudly exclaimed a few songs in. “We are from the Wild, Wild West Midlands of England.” Proud Chicagoans understood his enthusiasm and responded cheerfully – and loudly.

Their set had range. They opened with a feel nearly as silly-but-important as Liam Lynch’s “My United States of Whatever,” then rolled into sounds that felt Sublime-like.

And then came “Desperate Breakfast”.

This took their sound into a heavier, crunchier, more focused place, making their sound even more difficult to pin down stylistically. “Desperate Breakfast” touches on the grinding repetition of working life, feeding the pair’s mission to speak to their backgrounds and life in the area, not only for themselves, but for the working class as a whole.

Meanwhile, to celebrate songs’ endings, the DJ horn. Again. And again. If there was any doubt that Chicago was precisely the right place for their audacious wit, “Desperate Breakfast” left none by its end.

If Hicklin provided the personality, Moloney provided the propulsion. His thundering drums were the engine beneath the operation, letting Hicklin speak, bark, chant, and occasionally unleash a remarkably deep, hypnotic singing voice. Because so much of Hicklin’s performance relies on spoken word, those melodic turns landed with even greater force. Moloney supplied backing vocals from behind the kit while Hicklin punctuated the pair’s biggest moments by smacking that lone cymbal at stage right.

The minimal setup never felt particularly minimal. Neither did Big Special’s sense of humor.

“We’re here for the money, sorry about that,” Hicklin deadpanned before a cash-register sound effect rang out. Later, he acknowledged the contradiction between the band’s anti-capitalist leanings and the merchandise table waiting outside.

“We are not capitalist dickheads, but we are hypocrites because we are selling merch,” he joked, before encouraging the crowd to buy their shit.

That combination of honesty and humor became something of a Big Special calling card: truth and comedy delivered to a beat. Even when Hicklin seemed to be lecturing the room, pacing the stage and addressing the audience head-on, enough self-awareness in his delivery kept the performance from becoming a sermon.

The crowd was completely along for the ride. There was remarkably little rustling in the packed room; eyes stayed fixed on the stage as the duo shifted tempos, dropped in sound effects ranging from silly to psychedelic to sci-fi, and regularly interacted with an increasingly enthusiastic front row. Then came “Trees.”

“This song goes out to all the beautiful stoners in the house,” Hicklin announced. “We can’t see you, but we can smell you.”

By then, Big Special had graduated from commanding the stage to commandeering the entire room. Moloney stepped down from his kit and disappeared into the crowd, twirling a drumstick as phones briefly went up around him. Soon Hicklin followed, and the audience that had spent the beginning of the set captivated but relatively still finally broke loose.

It wasn’t quite a mosh pit. Instead, the floor seemed to pulse like a heartbeat, bodies jumping together as one.

“Chicago can dance!” Hicklin declared. Big Special had them.

“We fucking love Chicago,” he said later, noting that it was only the duo’s second time in the city and offering his approval of its pizza.

But, as promised early in the set, the evening’s politics were never far away. Before the final song, Hicklin used the stage to voice support for Palestine, Sudan and Congo and opposition to ICE, drawing another response from the crowd before introducing what he called Big Special’s “new international anthem”: “Shithouse”.

Hicklin let out a wicked laugh, and the duo tore into their finale.

By its end, the transformation was complete. The crowd that had initially watched Big Special with fascination was now entirely theirs, sending the pair off with a screaming ovation.

Bookended by the formidable Big Girl and Lambrini Girls, who brought the entire Vic down and treated fans to a big-time punk rock show, Big Special landed in the middle of an already stacked bill and came perilously close to stealing the whole damn evening. With thunderous percussion, working-class candor, cheeky banter, and rhythms seemingly engineered to make standing still impossible, the duo proved that proper punk doesn’t require a stage packed with musicians.

Sometimes, two guys, a drum kit, one strategically placed cymbal, and a DJ horn will do just fine.