Oasis lawsuit sinks huge $2M auction of rare 1990s tapes
Oasis has gone to court to stop its former sound engineer from selling more than 100 hours of unreleased recordings, and the Oasis lawsuit has already done its job: The auction is off.
The band, brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher and Sony Music Entertainment U.K. filed the legal action against engineer Huw Richards in London’s High Court on Tuesday, Sept. 29, according to legal records obtained by Billboard. The suit also names auction house Littleton Auctions and Richards’ son, Owain. Billboard valued the archive at more than $2 million.
Auction pulled after the Oasis lawsuit
Littleton confirmed to the BBC on Wednesday, Sept. 30, that the recordings would no longer be offered at its Oct. 3 sale.
“We are very disappointed that we cannot offer this significant archive as planned,” Littleton told the BBC.
Ben Homer, Littleton’s managing director, said in a statement that the Desk Tapes “have been withdrawn from our October 3 auction in light of legal proceedings,” Music Business Worldwide reported. Owain Richards confirmed the suit to the outlet: “It is true that Oasis have sued me and my father to try to prevent the auction.”
The specific claims in the Oasis lawsuit have not been made public.
What’s in the Desk Tapes
Richards was the band’s front-of-house sound engineer from the mid-1990s until 2001, a run that included the band’s 1996 Knebworth shows, according to Music Business Worldwide. His collection, known as the Desk Tapes, spans live sets, soundchecks and rehearsals from the ’90s, plus off-the-cuff conversations between the famously feuding Gallaghers. It may also hold the only known recording of a 1996 Oasis show near Scotland’s Loch Lomond. The band played two nights at Balloch Country Park on Aug. 3 and 4 that year to a combined crowd of about 80,000, STV News has reported.
Richards recorded the shows himself, straight from the mixing desk, which is where the archive got its name. The collection spans 63 live shows, and the sale also included memorabilia such as set lists, internal tour itineraries, an Epiphone guitar the band played and a Kangol Oasis tour parka, the PA news agency reported in The Irish News. Even without the Oasis lawsuit, a buyer could not have commercially released the tapes without the band’s cooperation, because Oasis holds the intellectual property rights, according to The Times as cited by PA.
The tapes reportedly capture “unfiltered dialogue” between Noel and Liam Gallagher, the kind of material that made the archive so attractive to collectors. The auction listing pitched the collection as “the only master archive of its kind in existence,” Music Business Worldwide reported.
When Littleton announced the auction in early September, it set a guide price of £1.2 million to £1.6 million. The band pushed back quickly. The auction house confirmed to the Guardian that Oasis had “expressed concerns” about the sale, and Owain Richards told the newspaper that talks with the band about the archive had “fizzled away.”
The band’s momentum
The fight lands during a busy stretch for the band. Oasis reunited in 2024 after years of bad blood between the Gallaghers, and its Oasis Live ’25 World Tour was one of last year’s big moneymakers. A second tour of 42 shows starts in May, and the brothers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year, Billboard noted.
Disney+ and Hulu will stream the reunion-tour documentary “Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger” starting Oct. 9, Deadline reported. During its theatrical run, the film became the top-grossing documentary of 2026 in the U.K.
What’s next
The Oasis lawsuit remains pending in London’s High Court.
Reporting from Billboard, Music Business Worldwide and Deadline contributed to this story.