Back Page For One Night Only!: BIG SPECIAL curate their dream gig 

Joe Hicklin: We thought that’d be fun; our sound guy Stu mentioned the idea of doing a gig there once and we thought that’d be so good. It’s [set in] late 19th Century, early 20th Century, sort of industrial revolution time. There’s a blacksmiths and cobbled streets and all that, and they have the snow machines at Christmas.

Callum Moloney: We’re gonna be bringing back some big headliners, and it’ll be finally putting the Black Country on the map again.

Joe: We’ve said Jimi Hendrix because, you know, he feels like he’s [embedded] within the history of modern music, and you wanna see Hendrix! I used to work for a guy called John, at a place called The Fountain in Walsall, and he said that he went to Isle of Wight [Festival] with his friend to watch Hendrix, and his friend got pissed and slept next to him for the whole time that Jimi did his famous Isle of Wight set, so this is for John’s mate!

Callum: We’ve got a joint one first. When we first met as teenagers, the first band we discovered together was an old blues band called Brown Bird.

Joe: They were a folky, Americana-style duo - husband and wife - and the guy, Dave Lamb, passed away and we were gutted as we never got to see them live. They just did some brilliant albums and it was the first music that we found together and bonded over. He was a great lyricist and it was just their two vocals together - MorganEve Swain plays double bass and fiddle and he played guitar and did percussion with his feet and it was just brilliant stuff. It was always mad that it was just a duo making all that sound with acoustic instruments. We’d love more people to give their music a listen.

Callum: We also said Tom Waits on piano and Johnny Cash doing a solo show; that’d be alright. There’s a lot of death on our line-up though… It’s almost like Tom Waits holding a seance of all of our favourite musicians.

Joe: We’re traditionalists in the sense that we believe we should drink and smoke.

Callum: That’s what festivals are for. We could add in a ferris wheel or something?

Joe: Is that in keeping with the Black Country Living Museum, though? Oh yes, they’ve got the little fair there. So, drink, smoke, mirror maze.

Joe: It’ll be Guinness, tequila and soda, or a cider.

Callum: A bit of everything!

Joe: Each other, and we said that we want a posse, don’t we? A posse dressed in the traditional Black Country Museum garb, please. Some butchers, some sweet shop owners, some blacksmiths, some colliers, some church people.

Callum: That’s part of the festival, too, it is set in that era [of the Black Country Living Museum].

Joe: They are going to lose their minds when Jimi Hendrix gets on the stage.

Callum: Yes, at The Fountain surely.

Joe: It’s the pub I used to work at and we’ve played there many times, so we’ll go there. I do like a lock-in. It’s about half an hour in a cab, but in this dream festival, it’s just there, right by the museum.

Joe: I’d like the snow machine, but not at Christmas. It’s a midsummer Black Country Living Museum rock and roll extravaganza. Noddy Holder’s doing the fish and chips, he’s there with the batter bits.

Callum: Free transport for one and all. This is the best festival I’ve heard of.

Joe: Actually, Desperate Dan’s Pie Factory is down the road from there so we could have a Desperate Dan pie stall. It’s actually all quite wholesome! Apart from all the zombies we have on stage…

Tags: Features, Big Special, May 2025