Orange Rockcorps

Between 4 and 5,000 people attended a gig at the Royal Albert Hall last Friday as reward for each giving up 4 hours of their time to work on projects designed to benefit local communities. Video footage on the Rockcorps website shows volunteers tramping through overgrown allotments, painting toilets in schools and clearing riverbanks of car tyres, amongst many other escapades. The clips also show off the smiles, laughter and general good-humoured spirit of participants, perhaps partly due to the fact that much of the work was undertaken by small groups of friends planning to attend the concert together.

So it was with nigh on total moral abandon that I deigned to attend the concert having contributed absolutely nothing in the way of time or energy to the overall effort, at any point, save maintaining a good friendship with someone working for the organisers who happened to have a spare ticket.

The gig itself was an exciting occasion (see how modestly I neglect to fully enunciate my resemblance to a modern day Jesus of Nazareth) thanks to Ludacris and Busta Rhymes, performing as the main acts for the night, and the crowd itself, that was in a frothy-mouthed frenzy when the rappers finally appeared late in the evening.

One of the important aspects of the 'Give, Get Given' concept is that those unable to afford a ticket to a gig like this one, had tickets been on general sale, could attend by 'paying' with something other than money. Almost everyone in the crowd seemed so genuinely excited and enthusiastic compared to paying crowds I've seen in the past, that I couldn't help wonder whether this method of getting a ticket has more advantages than just persuading people to work for free, or, indeed, whether those who turn up at the box office and blithely hand over their £30-100 for a concert ticket are always the die-hard fans they'd like you to think they are. There was a tangible feeling of community amongst the crowd and people seemed to have enjoyed the experience - earning and appreciating the chance to see the acts was a big part of that. 

Admittedly the event was sponsored by a multi-national corporation, but the success of the project seems to be a small star in the sky for something more humanistic, when much else is lost in the light pollution of capitalism.