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Oasis have taken legal action to stop a collection of unheard recordings being sold at auction this coming weekend.
Last month it was announced that Littleton Auctions were set to sell a collection known as The Desk Tapes, comprising of 63 concert recordings, over 100 hours of rehearsals tapes, soundcheck recordings, and “unfiltered” conversation between band members owned by the Manchester band’s former sound engineer Huw Richards, who worked as the front-of-house sound engineer for Oasis from 1995 to 2001.
The collection of 209 DAT tapes, 73 analogue cassettes and three MiniDiscs had been passed on to the auction house by Richards’ son, Owain. It was estimated that the collection would cost a potential buyer between £1.2m and £1.6m, but no-one would not be able to commercialise the archive without co-operation and permission from the band.
When the proposed auction was initially announced, it was reported that the Gallagher brothers had “expressed concerns”, with Owain Richards admitting to The Times newspaper that the Gallagher brothers “don’t want” the collection sold, and that they wanted the tapes “back in their possession.” That Oasis have now taken action to block the sale backs up this idea.
“Littleton Auctions confirms that the Oasis recordings known as The Desk Tapes have been withdrawn from our October 3 auction in light of legal proceedings,”the auction house’s managing director, Ben Homer, told the BBC. “We are very disappointed that we cannot offer this significant archive as planned.”
“It is true that Oasis have sued me and my father to try to prevent the auction of the tapes made by my father many years ago,” Owain Richards told the BBC. “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.”
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