“Hello, we’re John Grant.” They’re not. Cheeky chappies Big Special, here in Cardiff supporting the aforementioned Grant, are actually a pair of Midlanders performing gritty little ditties and gutter-punk poems about the dead-end dullness of modern life called things like Butcher’s Bin and Shithouse, taken from an album titled Postindustrial Hometown Blues. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Yet, in truth, you haven’t – not quite.
Sure, Big Special often sound like Sleaford Mods and Idles kissed, made up and joined forces. But there’s also a stylistic variety to their set, and when vocalist Joe Hicklin ditches the sprechgesang and really lets rip with his stadium roar, they start to live up to their name – particularly on transcendent album and set closer Dig, about rising above the daily grind. As with Mike Skinner, beneath their cocksure exterior lies a big beating heart.
John Grant’s connection to Cardiff runs deeper than merely a few previous tour stop-offs. The video for Chicken Bones, from 2010 solo debut Queen Of Denmark, was filmed in and around the city, and tonight Grant chuckles at the fact that he still wants to work with director Casey Raymond despite being made to walk down St Mary’s Street in a snug-fitting yellow superhero costume.
The video’s concept is simultaneously comical and apposite. While some of Grant’s intensely personal songs boil up the bones of dead relationships to make a richly satisfying broth, more explore his struggles with self-esteem, sexuality and religion, and his efforts to shed any protective mask and feel comfortable in his own skin. There’s a sense of knowing self-mockery about performatively donning a robe to sit at the piano, and the evening’s weightiest lines appear in undeniable set highlight Father, from his latest LP The Art Of The Lie: “I feel ashamed because I couldn’t be the man / You always hoped that I would become.”
Since Queen Of Denmark, Grant’s musical journey has taken him increasingly far into electronic territory. There’s all manner of vintage-looking technological eye candy on stage, and his arrival armed with a keytar signals that the emphasis will be on more recent St Vincent-y electrofunk material. But the final track on The Art Of The Lie, Zeitgeist, proves he hasn’t abandoned the poignant piano ballads entirely, and forms part of a magical four-song segment performed to stunned silence.
That section is positioned too soon in the overall structure of the set, a decision almost as mystifying as the occasional deliberate mangling of his magnificent voice through effects. But when Grant declares, on inevitable and glorious finale GMF, “I am the greatest motherfucker you’re ever gonna meet” – a commentary on how rampant egotism can be born out of fragile self-confidence – you find yourself inclined to take it at face value and agree with him.
John Grant + Big Special, Tramshed, Cardiff, Thurs 24 Oct
words BEN WOOLHEAD photos CEIRIOS BEBB