Keith Richards: the Stones don’t want fans to ‘starve their babies’ for tickets

Guitarist says the band didn’t go with the promoter who would have charged the most, despite tickets costing up to $2,000

Keith Richards has admitted he would prefer people did not have to “starve their babies” in order to afford tickets to see the Rolling Stones current US tour.

The rock’n’roll veterans are back on the road in the US again following their reunion shows last year. But the tour has again attracted controversy for its ticket prices, with tickets ranging from $150 to $2,000 for the ultimate package. The band were reportedly forced to cut prices for the opening night of the tour in Los Angeles to guarantee a full house.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, the guitarist acknowledged the criticisms of the pricing for the Stones tour, but said pricing is largely out of his hands. He said: “From my point of view, it’s like this. We say we want to put a Stones tour together and people come to us with proposals. And these proposals are all basically the same.”

Richards said the Stones taken steps to make the gigs affordable: “We actually did push the prices down a little bit. We took the lower offer, in other words. But, um, it’s the price of the market. I don’t really know. I don’t have much to do with it other than I would like to people to get in, to be able to afford to get in, without sort of starving their babies and all. And that’s about it.”

In the same interview, Mick Jagger was even more reticent, saying just: “Well, I don’t know. I don’t really want to go … that’s like an endless, sort of [conversation about] commerce versus art, [and] rebelliousness.”

Despite the reports from LA, the band’s US promoter has denied ticket prices had been slashed in some venues after the tour struggled to sell out. John Meglen of Concerts West told Billboard: “It’s unfortunate in our business that everybody wants to be cynics. The fact is, the tour is doing great and we have no problems whatsoever.” He added that any price cuts were part of parent company AEG Live’s “flex price” strategy to curb touting. “There are no $600 tickets turning into $85 tickets, I can assure you of that.”

The tour’s gross profit is being projected at £65m. The Stones may claim that they need the money, since Michael Eavis has insisted that the band will not be getting their usual fee for headlining Glastonbury this year, instead being paid the “bog standard price for a headliner”.

Source: The Guardian