I have lived in Birmingham for 17 years now, and worked here for 5 or 6 years before that. However I don’t think I achieved my peak Birmingham experience until the other weekend.

I had thought my peak Birmingham experience, probably never to be surpassed, was in November 2024 when I saw Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds on their Wild God tour at BP Pulse Live (formerly the Birmingham NEC) perform Red Right Hand (the anthem of The Peaky Blinders). Surely once you have been one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan designed and directed by his red right hand there is nowhere else to go?

But turns out I may have been wrong.

Last Saturday I headed out to the mess of streets that is Digbeth, partitioned from the persistent remnants of the HS2 project, walking past derelict post-industrialism juxtaposed with pubs, art installations and other small businesses and a big coach station. This is where the Birmingham Science Fiction Group operate out of, courtesy of the Friends of the Earth, but today I was headed for the The Institute.

The Digbeth Institute originally opened in 1908 as a mission of Carrs Lane Congregational Church and, despite its various rock venue reincarnations as the HMV Institute and, currently, the O2 Institute as well as formerly housing a club in its basement (variously operating as the Midland Jazz Club, Jug ‘O Punch Folk Club, Dance Factory and Barfly over the years), it retains an ecclesiastical air at times. It is a place to preach from the pulpit.

The preachers tonight are, first, Good Health Good Wealth (the singer, Bruce Breakey, with his arm hilariously in a sling, delivering lyrics with a poetic flourish alongside the guitarist Simon Kuzmickas), then Black Country duo Gans (Euan Woodman electric on the drums and Tom Rhodes on bass and vocals) augmented to a trio tonight by Tommy Schlugs on flute and saxophone. And, finally, the reason I came, Big Special.

The evening is given an extra resonance by the appearance of Bradley Taylor as MC. Bradley is a great poet and extraordinary performer of poetry for someone so young. I first saw him perform when the Hay Festival did an outreach event in Birmingham last year and immediately bought his book You Missed The Best Part. Between Good Health Good Wealth and Gans he does the one about his Nan’s funeral. Then before Big Special there’s Got A Light and the one where he operates between audience hand claps, which works brilliantly to introduce the band.

Big Special are a Midlands-based duo (singer Joe Hicklin, strictly from Walsall not Birmingham, which is important if you live in the West Midlands, and drummer Callum Moloney) who manage to condense absolute fury with tenderness and an emotional intensity just this side of sentimentality. I first heard them on Radio 6 (and the audience from there is acknowledged on the night by Callum, saying he can smell the essence of craft IPA and Stuart Maconie) and was blown away by God Save The Pony (“I hope you’re never tired, I hope you’re never lonely”) with its, for me, resonances of Neil Kinnock’s speech in 1983 just before Margaret Thatcher’s re-election:

I warn you not to be ordinary

I warn you not to be young

I warn you not to fall ill

I warn you not to get old

They are very loud, very sweary, but touchingly innocent too. Joe has a Chaplinesque quality to his stage presence which diffuses some of the tension racked up by the super-powered drumming and dance tracks. They act their way through the set, bringing on their manager Steve (as in “we’ve got to pay Steve” from their song Shop Music) as a money grubbing man who knows the price of everything.

The set ends with Shithouse, which they offer as our new national anthem. “Never in a million fucking years did I ever think I’d ever see your fucking face again” it begins. They come off briefly, then come back on, do one more song and then we have…a raffle! For Cancer Research. They have built up Steve’s part so much by this time that he actually gets booed while conducting a raffle for Cancer Research. The prize is a drum skin with, for some reason, the certified blood of the Gans drummer on it. The winner is upstairs, so the prize is frisbeed to him by Joe, narrowly avoiding decapitating another member of the audience in the process.

It is chaotic, fun and disarming. As they say:

We have been twice around the world now and what everywhere has in common is that it is totally fucked. And we don’t have any solutions. We are just two dickheads from the Midlands. But what we can do is join with you here to scream into the void.

Joe finally plays a bit of guitar at this point and accompanies himself on a beautiful rendition of Dragged up a hill. And then it’s all over.

This is music of the powerless. I recommend you listen to it.