Radiohead's free tickets for cyclists in Paris go mostly unclaimed

Fifty free tickets to Radiohead's two sold-out nights at Bercy in Paris last week were on offer to the first people to reach the Paris office of the band's label on a Vélib', one of the city's bike-share bicycles, on Thursday 5 June. Fewer than a third were claimed.

The offer was one of the tour's green measures. The shows are in city centres near public transport, fans are asked to come by train or boat rather than fly, and the stage is lit with LED and fluorescent tubes instead of high-wattage spotlights. Even the tour T-shirts, at 28 euros, are labelled as organic cotton mixed with recycled plastic bottles.

The Sun has the offer open to fans, for front-row places, at the Paris office of XL Recordings, the band's label, with 15 of the 50 tickets taken. It quotes an unnamed source who says the French did not share the band's intentions and simply ignored it. The Connexion, the English-language paper in France, says the tickets were meant for journalists, and that 14 people came, some of them on foot.