Mumford & Sons tackle ticket touts with on-the-day sales

Mumford & Sons are selling on-the-day tickets for their concert in London's Hyde Park on Friday (08Jul16) in an effort to beat touts.

Recent pictures have emerged from Rihanna and Beyonce concerts in London showing half-full stadiums even though the show was advertised as being sold out. It's thought ticket touts are to blame for this as they buy tickets and try to resell them at extortionate prices, so they don't get used.

The indie folk rockers are taking steps to tackle this issue by giving out 500 tickets to their Barclaycard British Summer Time headlining show, supported by Alabama Shakes and Wolf Alice, even though it was previously advertised as sold out.

"In an effort to stop ticket touts we've held back 500 tickets at the door tomorrow. See you soon... #MumfordHydePark," they wrote on Twitter on Thursday evening (07Jul16).

Their manager Adam Tudhope recently spoke to Britain's Daily Mirror newspaper following the pictures of Rihanna and Beyonce's half-empty Wembley Stadium shows.

“We work hard to make the face value of the ticket as accessible to as many of the fans as possible," he said. "So there’s nothing worse for the band playing a ‘sold-out’ show than looking out at empty seats because touts bought the tickets and tried to (sell) them on secondary sites at massively inflated prices.”

The band's announcement came the same day as a hilarious video showing the indie stars ditching their usual folk look to impersonate punk rockers blink-182 was posted on YouTube. They are dressed in punk rock clothes, including basketball caps and shorts with long socks, playing colorful electric guitars and rocking out to blink-182's new 30 second track Brohemian Rhapsody.

In the sketch the band are pretending to be blink inside the trio's dressing room. Frontman Marcus Mumford has spiked up his hair up with gel and Winston Marshall lip-syncs to the song into a banana.

They are interrupted by the real blink-182, with new member Matt Skiba. Mark Hoppus looks at the group and asks, "What the..." and the video cuts out before he swears. The video was filmed to promote the punk band's new album California, which was released this month (Jul16).