An old Craig Finn podcast (and a digression on positive hardcore and posi-punk)

A few months ago, when their last album was coming out, there was an interesting article about The Hold Steady in the paper and I thought I had to hear what they sounded like. So I headed for their website and downloaded this twenty-minute podcast by singer Craig Finn, recorded in 2006. It was a disappointment in that it contained absolutely nothing by THS, but what was there more than made up for it – five classic American punk tracks from the late Eighties / early Nineties. I was going to delete it but then I read Finn’s article about American hardcore in the Guardian the other day (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/feb/13/us-punk-rock-hold-steady) and I had to listen to it again.

Replacements – “I Will Dare”
Bad Brains – “Right Brigade”
Soul Asylum – “Sometime To Return”
Gorilla Biscuits – “Start Today”
Descendants – “Sour Grapes”.

The song by the Replacements is especially worth a mention. All of this podcast is great but there is something about it that makes me feel a bit sad. This is young people’s music. And I am getting old.

Unfortunately, the podcast disappeared from The Hold Steady’s site a few weeks later so I can’t do a link, and I don’t normally post music here because it is more hassle than it’s worth. But if anyone really, really really wants to hear it let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

To digress briefly, I was intrigued by Craig Finn referring to the Gorilla Biscuits as “positive hardcore”. About 20 years ago I was puzzled by a reference in Marc Riley's song “Snipe”, to something called “posi-punk”. I had assumed I had misheard it but I wondered if it meant the same as Finn’s positive hardcore. It turns out that they are entirely separate sub-genres of punk, posi-punk being an early name (coined by the NME, which explains why I never heard it, being a Sounds person back then) for what became known as Goth (Goth music? positive?!?). What interests me about this is the fact that punk, for all its apparent emphasis on freedom and spontaneity, attracts such trainspotterish distinctions.