Big Special/Scrounge/Pet Insurance @ Strange Brew, Bristol – Sunday May 12th 2024

After a couple of great opening sets from Pet Insurance and Scrounge Big Special took to the stage in cowboy hats, perhaps a nod to their country roots…Black Country that is. 

Just a few days after the release of hotly tipped debut album, Post Industrial Hometown Blues (number 15 in the midweek charts apparently, they're coming for you Taylor Swift), the Spesh play the whole bostin' shebang end to end kicking off with a particularly propulsive (and ever so slightly krautrockish in places, to my ears at least...but then again my ears are a bit fucked) Black Country Gothic. 

We're soon into a trio of the band’s finest with Desperate Breakfast, Shithouse (surely a shoe-in for the theme song of the forthcoming Peaky Blinders film) and This Here Ain’t Water all making the most of punk poet preacher Joe’s unique way with words and drummer Callum’s way with, well, beating three flavours of shit out his kit (what the hell are his sticks made from? Australian Buloke?). 

It’s a powerfully potent mix, calling to mind a little Sleaford Mods, Idles and (for those of us in the know) The Courtesy Group who they share their distinctive and self-deprecating Black Country spirit with. Between song banter keeps the mood lighter than you might imagine and a set climaxing wander into the crowd almost prompts a little mild moshing (it was a Sunday night though and given that a lot of the audience were 6Music dads of a certain age they probably thought better of it...now that I'm 54 I can get away with saying shit like that). 

Judging by the healthy number of people in the audience already sporting Big Special t-shirts they were clearly preaching to the converted but it’s easy to see ‘em going down an absolute storm during festival season, the perfect soundtrack to a country and, let’s face it, world that’s slowly but ever so surely going down the pan. They’re already special, now watch ‘em go big.