A custom Epiphone guitar once owned by Noel Gallagher has sold for £12,000 at auction, headlining a memorabilia sale marked by a last-minute legal dispute over unreleased Oasis recordings.
The 1997 instrument, finished in Manchester City blue, is believed to be one of five identical guitars gifted to Gallagher by the manufacturer. The songwriter later gave it to Huw Richards, the band’s former front-of-house sound engineer. Richards’ son consigned the guitar alongside other tour memorabilia.
The auction was originally scheduled to feature «The Desk Tapes», an extensive archive of unreleased material valued between £1.2mn and £1.6mn. The collection contains recordings from 63 live shows, soundchecks and more than 100 hours of rehearsals from the 1990s.
However, Littleton Auctions pulled the tapes from the sale after Oasis filed an injunction, with the auction house agreeing to postpone the lot until the legal dispute is settled.
Rare ephemera and unsold showpiece
Despite the withdrawal of the master tapes, collectors bid competitively on the remaining lots from the Richards collection. A Kangol rain jacket issued to touring personnel sold for £2,000, while a framed set of 11 platinum discs presented by Creation Records for UK sales of «(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?» also realised £2,000.
Additional lots included tour itineraries, promotional items and a «Be Here Now» wrist watch.
Items consigned by other sellers also attracted strong interest, including memorabilia predating the band’s commercial breakthrough. A concert ticket for The Rain, the Manchester band that later became Oasis, went for £2,400. An early demo cassette fetched £3,600, a set of vintage band photographs achieved £5,400 and a pair of Gallagher’s leather shoes sold for £1,200.
However, the sale’s highest-profile physical piece failed to find a buyer. A baby grand piano featured on the artwork for the 1994 debut single «Supersonic», valued at between £100,000 and £150,000, went unsold after failing to meet its reserve price.
