Extreme Listening Mode!

‘So you all up for a good time?’ asks Craig Finn laconically as his band take to the stage in the small but perfectly formed Carling Academy 2. It’s a redundant question - Newcastle on a Friday night is always up for a party, even more so when hosting the mighty Minneapolis combo. It’s a bonus show, the band having been on a support jaunt round UK arenas with Counting Crows - there is no justice in this sick world of ours - before hitting the festivals, with T in the Park lined up tomorrow. It’s fairly obvious the band are relishing the intimate setting after playing to half-empty cowsheds for three weeks as they launch into ‘Constructive Summer’, their Positive Noise manifesto which kicks off new album ‘Stay Positive’. Any fears that they are going to simply blast out the new album at the expense of old favourites are ended by superior run-throughs of ‘Party Pit’, the really rather mental ‘Massive Night’s and a fantastic version of ‘Banging Camp’. The crowd are now totally up for it, and the band react with some highlights from the new album, including the title track, which instantly leaps into live favourite category.

The great thing about The Hold Steady live is how much they enjoy it. These songs are not simply bar-room stompers, nor are they all designed to have you swaying and holding up your camera phone. The Hold Steady, like Springsteen, are aware of how to use everything at their disposal to engage the audience. Finn is a unique performer, flailing, speaking off-mic to the crowd during songs, he waves his guitar around like a prop, only occasionally playing. Tad Kuebler on guitar is a proper axeman, including the rarely-sighted double-necked guitar. In thrall to Jimmy Page? Of course, but who cares when the results are so thrilling? Indeed, this honesty is why the Hold Steady transcend their influences and become so much more important. It’s all about the show, it’s all about the songs. It’s all-or-nothing with The Hold Steady. It’s refreshing to see a band with no agendas, no plan for success. They just do what they want to and hope people like it. It’s so wonderfully nuanced that you know you couldn’t learn it. You can either do this or you can’t. No artifice.

Possibly demob-happy from ending their support sentence, the set features quite a heavy sprinkling from ‘Separation Sunday’, though nothing at all from ‘Almost Killed Me’. The new material - not physically released till Monday, but on e-music - goes down well with the rabid crowd, who judging by accents have travelled from all parts of the UK to be here. They end with ‘Slapped Actress’, before encoring with the crowd-pleasing ‘Chips Ahoy’ and ‘How A Resurrection Really Feels’. Indeed, such is the air of joie de vivre, that Finn asks Kuebler if he ‘can take one’ and provides a solo so horrid it almost dies in shame on its way to the amp. And the band laugh, and the crowd laugh and it all feels like we’re all in this together.

The only disappointment at the end of a Hold Steady show is that you don’t know when the next one will be. But if they keep delivering quality like this, ELM will be there. Stay Positive? No problem with these guys as the soundtrack.