by Ian on November 14, 2012
Laetitia Sadier – singer and lyricist of Stereolab – supported by Pen Pastwn and Jens Bosteen played at Clwb Ifor Bach on Monday 12th November 2012.
Three members of Pen Pastwn – Richard James (of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci), Gareth Bonello (of The Gentle Good) and Andy Fung (of Derrero) – played a fantastic half hour acoustic set - photograph here.
Singer-songwriter Jens Bosteen followed, performing songs from his new (debut) album ‘Second Skin‘.
Laetitia Sadier headlined the evening, accompanied by band members Emmanuel Mario on drums and Xavi Muñoz on bass, with songs mainly coming from her new album ‘Silencio‘. I was particularly impressed by the drumming of Emmanuel Mario – and with a little pointing in the right direction from the Stereolab forum found out a little more about him on the Plug Research site.
Wonderful evening of music in an intimately small venue!
‘An Appeal to the Young’ is a short essay by Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). It was first published in 1880 in Kropotkin’s paper, La Revolte, and issued as a pamphlet shortly afterwards. Passionate, effective and (as with many of his works) still well worth reading today.
I first started reading anarchist literature in my teens – probably 1979/1980, around the time when I first heard the Crass single Bloody Revolutions on the John Peel radio show
You talk about your revolution, well, that’s fine.
But what are you going to be doing come the time?
Are you going to be the big man with the tommy-gun?
Will you talk of freedom when the blood begins to run?
Well, freedom has no value if violence is the price.
Don’t want your revolution, I want anarchy and peace.
Two of the first publications that really stuck a chord with me were Mikhail Bakunin’s ‘God and the State’ and Peter Kropotkin’s ‘An Appeal to the Young’.
I have just started trying to make my own ebooks and thought that I would start experimenting with these two shortish pamphlets and would try and make them more widely available and hopefully more widely read.
So far I’ve just produced Kropotkin’s Appeal, which you can download as the free ebook (.prc format) or for a small cost download a Kindle version from Amazon UK or Amazon US
(or indeed from any other European Amazon site). Apologies for the cost of the Kindle version – the publishing process I used didn’t seem to allow me to bypass setting a price so I went as low as I could! Of course, the free prc version will work on Kindle – just use something like Calibre to upload it to your device.
Bakunin’s ‘God and the State’ will be my next ebook project!
