"ROCKETING interest" in the Redditch AIR music festival saw townsfolk snapping up every available ticket at the weekend after it was announced they would be given away.

Festival organiser Councillor Rebecca Blake said she was encouraged after the council managed to shift 3,500 tickets on Saturday alone for the Jools Holland concert and 4,000 tickets for the Pop in the Park.

She said: "The hotline went crazy after we announced tickets were free and there were hordes of people queuing up for them on Saturday."

The shock announcement that tickets would be given away came on Thursday after ailing sales.

Tickets for Jools Holland's Rhythm and Blues Orchestra were initially available at £25 and Sunday's Pop In The Park event, featuring Natasha Bedingfield, Lemar and Liberty X, cost £18.

The council has coughed up the £500,000 needed for the ambitious project but hoped to recoup most of that through ticket sales.

But Ms Blake said: "We are looking at this not as a 'one-off' event but for the long term and we hope to gain the money back over time as the festival becomes more established."

She denied she was disappointed

and said she was proud of the council's achievements in staging the town's first ever arts festival, which encompasses three weeks of entertainment and events.

She said: "This is only our first year of doing something like this. But this will become a regular fixture in Redditch and for next year's event, we'll have 12 months preparation and experience behind us.

"We're confident in our choice of four excellent pop acts but an event of this scale takes time to build up and the pressure is always on in the first year to build up a reputation."

Conservative opposition leader Carole Gandy said she was "full of admiration" and wholly supported the council's "imaginative" idea to stage the star-studded concerts.

But she said the pop event had not been sufficiently marketed and tickets had failed to sell because organisers "tried to do too much, too soon".

She said: "They tried to run before they could walk - instead they should have started on a smaller scale and built it up year by year.''

She added she was now concerned the free tickets could be snapped up by people outside Redditch.

"Effectively, we could see a situation where a 'free' concert is funded by Redditch taxpayers but enjoyed by people living outside of the town, which is totally unfair," she said.

"But it was an unavoidable decision because tickets were selling so slowly - the acts wouldn't have taken kindly to performing in front of an empty space."