Oxfam's Month Of Musical Magic

October is Rocktober for Oxfam, with the annual Oxjam festival kicking off and also a new TV advert from Annie Lennox hitting the airwaves.

Oxjam is a UK wide music event organised by the charity Oxfam which took place for the first time in October 2006. Throughout October, hundreds of musical events will be taking place across Great Britain to raise money for Oxfam’s work to find lasting solutions to poverty, suffering and injustice around the world. To raise awareness of the events, Jarvis Cocker, The Kooks, Fatboy Slim and several other British musicians have created a PSA to encourage music fans to attend gigs or even organize a show for themselves.

Last year’s Oxjam was extremely popular and featured over 3000 gigs across the UK, as well as a special series of shows held in an Oxfam shop in London that featured Jamelia, Fatboy Slim, and The Kooks. Concerts featuring every type of musical genre imaginable were staged, encompassing rock, classical, dance, pop, R&B, rap, techno, and more. Some of the more bazaar events last year included a 12 hour “buskathon”, featuring buskers in 12 British cities, and a “guitar relay”, in which a guitar was taken from one end of the British mainland to the other, and was played at a different Oxjam concert each day on the way.

“Oxjam is all about thousands of small events adding up to something much bigger,” said The Kooks singer, Luke Pritchard. “So it’s great to join in by playing a small acoustic show. Even better, music fans can get involved by coming along to this show or going to a local Oxjam night.”

Also on a musical theme, a new T.V advert – featuring a voiceover by Annie Lennox and music from Muse – has been created by Oxfam for the campaign “Be Humankind.”

The ad has been created to encourage people to take their sense of injustice about the state of the world and do something about it. Oxfam is asking people to tap into their self conscious – that part of them that won’t stand by and watch people suffer – and join their campaign to end poverty. And with nearly half the world living in poverty, Oxfam needs everybody to join them in the fight for a better human race.

To find out more about Oxjam – including where and where events are being held – visit their website. To view this year’s PSA, click here. Annie Lennox’s new TV ad can be found at YouTube.