The NTS Breakfast Show, and a multitude of fun
MULTITUDES is out now. And no, I did not deliberately coordinate my jacket with the cover art
Firstly: there are still £5 tickets available for two Multitudes talks in London this week: at Burley Fisher bookshop in Dalston on Weds 30 October, with Hettie O’Brien. And then at Whitechapel Gallery on Thurs 31 October, with Adam Moore.
The launch event at Conway Hall was great fun, and we sold out all the tickets and all the books, pleasingly — thanks very much if you joined at Conway Hall, or via the stream. Here is one of the slides, so you can all see how skilled I am at PowerPoint:
If you’d like an insight into the contents before you buy MULTITUDES: How Crowds Made the Modern World — currently discounted on Hive.co.uk here — there are many ways of finding out. Here’s a round-up of fun book things from the first week:
*** On launch day I joined Flo Dill on the esteemed NTS Breakfast Show. It was kind of a dream — as close as I’ll get to doing Desert Island Discs! — I got to play songs by Andalusian communist flamenco singer El Cabrero, by Anne Briggs, by Young Dot (aka Dot Rotten / Zeph Ellis), and by 26,000 Hibs fans, as well as several overlooked Ruff Sqwad classics from the mid-2000s. And to talk about crowd joy, protests, music, carnivals and Spain with Flo! What a treat. Listen back here.
*** Why our ideas about protest and mob psychology are dangerously wrong — this is an Opinion piece, published last week in The Guardian. This short piece contains the central argument of the book in microcosm, with some fresh thoughts on the far-right riots in August.
*** I was on Novara FM with the brilliant Eleanor Penny. It’s always fun to do Novara things — I was on Novara FM when it was still just a weekly radio show on Resonance FM, in the week of the 2011 riots (amazingly this is still online).
*** I was on another of my favourites, Sobremesa, the English-language Spanish politics and culture podcast, with Eoghan Gilmartin, whose writing from Madrid I have been a fan of for some time — we talked about Cadiz Carnaval, fiestas, Spanish demos, general strikes, the indignados movement and more.
*** I was also on this ideas-led American podcast, which was good fun - the host asked me about the US sports ‘tradition’ of riots taking place in a city after the local team has won a key match, which I confess I am still a bit confounded by — further research into this specific type of crowd conflagration is needed!
*** There’s an extract from Multitudes about Notting Hill Carnival and its roots in anti-racist protest here on Crack Magazine, and in the new print magazine too.
*** There’s another extract from Multitudes here on Jacobin about street protests in Britain, how they are policed and treated historically.
Now: get yourself a copy of the book, and then get outside!
