A limited edition electric guitar once owned by Oasis legend Noel Gallagher has been sold for £12,000 at auction. The Epiphone instrument in Manchester City blue was one of a number of items put up for sale by the son of Huw Richards, a former front-of-house sound engineer with the band. But a set of unheard Oasis recordings valued at between £1.2m and £1.6m was pulled from the auction last week, after the band filed an injunction.
That collection of recordings, known as The Desk Tapes, includes recordings of 63 live shows, soundchecks and more than 100 hours of rehearsals from the band’s rise and rise in the 1990s. Littleton Auctions in Worcestershire, which handled the auction, said it had agreed to postpone the sale until the legal dispute had been resolved.
The recordings were brought to sale by the sound engineer’s son, Owain Richards, who said: “We have agreed to postpone the auction [of the tapes] to enable the legal dispute to be resolved either by litigation or otherwise in an orderly way.”
When the sale was first announced, Littleton Auctions called it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity for fans and collectors alike”, but confirmed the band did not support the sale. Another of the items in his collection, a Kangol rain jacket produced for the band’s touring personnel, sold for £2,000.
The Epiphone guitar was made in 1997 and the auctioneer said it is believed to be one of five identical guitars gifted to Noel Gallagher by the manufacturer before being given to Richards. A collection of 11 framed platinum discs, from the Oasis album What’s the Story Morning Glory, which also belonged to Richards, sold for £2,000.
They had been presented to him by Creation Records to recognise United Kingdom sales of more than 3.3 million copies. A collection of early Oasis photos sold for £5,400 and a pair of leather shoes which once belonged to Noel Gallagher sold for £1,200.
But a baby grand piano, which featured in the artwork for the Supersonic single, which was valued at between £100,000 and £150,000, failed to sell.
