Radiohead ask ticket buyers how they are getting to the show

According to American Songwriter, Radiohead are sending everyone who bought tickets through W.A.S.T.E., the band's shop and fan club, a questionnaire about how they plan to travel to the show, as the August North American leg gets ready to open at Lollapalooza in Chicago on Friday 1 August. Anyone who fills it in gets a free mp3 of “Bangers and Mash”, recorded live at Malahide Castle in Dublin on 6 June, the first night of the European run. Each answer brings up the environmental cost of that way of travelling, and the band mean to use the results to plan greener tours and to make concert-goers think about how they get there.

The questionnaire follows from a study the band commissioned in 2007 from Best Foot Forward, an Oxford company, which measured the footprint of two of their recent American tours, one of out-of-town amphitheatres and one of city-centre theatres. Most of the impact came from the fans, in their travel and what they consumed: 86 per cent of it on the theatre tour and 97 per cent on the amphitheatre tour. Short of no-one coming to see us, we'd like to share with our fans some ways of reducing this³, the band wrote at the time.

This year the band have booked as many shows as they could in city centres with good public transport. The equipment crosses the Atlantic by sea, which the band reckon saves 47 tonnes of CO2, there are no chartered flights, and the band fly as little as they can. When they launched the travel pages on radiohead.com in early May, they admitted to setting off via a plane, unfortunately⁴. Those pages have a carbon calculator comparing ways of reaching each venue, with public transport details for every date and car-sharing incentives at some venues where there is none. The stage lighting is a low-power LED rig, which Richard Young, the production manager, wrote about on the band's site on 1 July.

Liars, who opened the American shows in May, described the backstage side on their MySpace page. Everyone on the tour got a reusable water flask on day one, plastic was all but banned, every bus and lorry ran on biofuel, engines were never left idling and nothing went by air freight. In a world full of fear and ripe with insincerity it's such a relief to have met Radiohead².