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Music

Give a Home: the House Show Series Taking Over People’s Living Rooms

On 20 September, Amnesty International and a secret gig company will turn strangers' homes into venues for charity.
Photo by the author

Don't know about you guys but I feel as though you truly realise you're not "young" when you stop constantly going to house shows. And by that I mean 16-24 age bracket young. The sort of young where you can still go on X Factor and not immediately be lumped in with all the over "over-25s" while Sharon Osbourne tries to mentor you into a product Simon Cowell can sell at Christmas. The sort of young where staying up all night doesn't make you worry about either your skincare regime or how you're going to face doing the vacuuming when that morning turns into afternoon. I'm talking about the sort of young where the sweat and elbows-in-your-face chaos of a house show doesn't make you fret about your "no shoes rule" on the living room carpet. Case in point, the photo at the top of the page that I took at a house show when I was about 21 – a night which ended with my friend's glasses smashed in two and a more tightly fastened closeness in our relationship.

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Well, forget about everything I just said because you could be one of hundreds of people who get to attend a gig in a complete stranger's front room in autumn. Amnesty International are linking up with secret gig company Sofar Sounds on a concert series they're calling Give a Home, where both emerging and established musicians will be rocking up to people's houses to play about 300 gigs in 60 countries on Wednesday 20 September. It's all happening to raise money for and show solidarity with refugees who've been displaced from their homes, their lives turned upside-down by political upheaval.

"With more than 21 million people forced to flee their home country, the world refugee crisis is one of the defining issues of our era," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's Secretary General, in a statement. "How we respond to it now will shape who we are for generations to come. This is our moment to defend the things that unite us and refuse to let fear and prejudice win."

So today, on World Refugee Day, you can apply here for pairs of tickets to catch one of the gigs in your closest city, until 10 September. So far, some of the names confirmed include Wild Beasts, Local Natives, Jessie Ware and Ghetts, with more to come. If you're chosen, you'd then be asked to make an optional donation to Amnesty on the night, to help support the work the organisation does fighting for the global recognition of people's human rights. For full disclosure, both VICE and Facebook Live are partners in this too.

So if you've never lived in a place where a band will just show up at someone's house before everyone mucks in to roll a couple of amps in, plug everything in and then turn an open-plan living area into a moshpit then here's your chance to have at it. How much you mosh to Wild Beasts or Nadine Shah would be up to you – but there's no age restriction on this kind of house show.

You can find Tshepo on Twitter.