(Source of Newspaper Name Unknown) – 14th December 1979
POP FANS planning to see the sell-out Blondie concert in Leicester over Christmas may have to pay more than £40 for a black-market ticket.
Tickets which went on sale in November for £4.25 and £4.75 for the December 27 concert at De Montfort Hall are being sold at nearly ten times that price.
Fans – some of whom criticised the lack of notice given of the day tickets went on sale – are advertising in papers and attracting marketeers with their “any price paid” offers.
Mrs. Doreen Jones, of 298 Milligan Road, Aylestone, advertised for a ticket for her son and his friend, both ardent Blondie fans.
The cheapest tickets she was offered were two for £26, the dearest two for £65.
“One person who phoned offering tickets for sale had advertised to get them himself. It seems ridiculous to me that people should be allowed to make a profit this way,” she said.
She felt tickets should have been limited to two per person to give real fans a chance to get seats.
City entertainments manager Mr. David Lingham said most of the advertising had been done through press releases and through word of mouth.
The news that the group were coming to Leicester was also leaked on Radio One.
Mr. Lingham added that there was a limit of four tickets per person to stop touts buying a lot of the tickets, but there would always be people who bought tickets they did not need.
A spokesman for the promoters, Umbrella Productions Ltd., said he was concerned about black-market tickets.
But people were prepared to pay other people to line up and buy tickets, and there is no way of stopping them.
“Even if we had sold the tickets through the post, the marketeers would have sent in a thousand applications. There will always be people who make a profit out of such a concert,” he said.
“We had difficulty advertising the day the box-office would be selling tickets in Leicester. In all the other cities on the tour, Debbie Harry had phoned into the local commercial radio station on the day that tickets went on sale, but in Leicester there is no commercial radio to phone into,” he said.
