More T, Please

Within 48 hours of this year’s sell-out T In The Park, Big Day Out promoter Geoff Ellis put 35,000 tickets for 2007 on sale and sold them in just more than an hour.

The tickets, which were available at 2006 prices, were available to Internet and telephone customers at 9 a.m. July 11th.

Ellis, a determined campaigner against secondary market sellers, is making life harder for the touts by capping the offer at two per person and hanging on to the hard copy tickets until much nearer next summer’s July 7-8 event.

The crowd at this year’s bash at Balado (July 8-9), the U.K.’s biggest 2006 festival in the absence of Glastonbury, drew praise from the organizers and police as there were only 35 arrests among the 75,000 people attending the two-day event.

Among the acts helping the fans to stay cool in the hot weather were Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Who, Kaiser Chiefs, The Strokes, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Placebo, Editors, Delays, Corinne Bailey Rae, and Sigur Ròs,

Fans at Oxegen, T In The Park’s sister festival in Ireland, also drew praise from the organizers and the police as the Saturday crowd braved persistent rain and high winds.

“They were amazing, incredibly well behaved and good humoured,” MCD chief Denis Desmond said via the festival Web site, while Superintendent Tom Neville of Naas police said the event planning meetings played a major role in the success.

The 70,000-capacity gathering at Punchestown horse-racing track, which shares at least a dozen acts with its Scottish counterpart, sold out several weeks in advance.

– John Gammon