London, United Kingdom (September 30, 2026)—Stadium rockers Oasis had a hit with the song “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” but they might not be taking their own advice this week. The band filed an injunction Tuesday to prevent its former FOH engineer, Huw Richards, from auctioning off his archive of vintage Oasis board tapes, rehearsals and soundchecks.
The massive tape library was originally due to be sold on October 3 by Worcestershire, UK-based Littleton Auctions as part of an “Icons and Artifacts” music memorabilia auction, but has been withdrawn from sale, pending the outcome of the legal proceedings.
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Putting the “sonic” in “Supersonic” for the band’s live shows, Richards mixed Oasis from 1995 through 2001, accumulating a staggering number of recordings in the process that traced the band’s commercial peak. The archive includes 63 concerts and more than 100 hours of rehearsals, soundchecks and band discussions, all captured direct from the house desk. The stash is spread across 209 DAT tapes, 73 cassettes and three MiniDiscs. Littleton Auctions listed the collection with an auction estimate upward of £1.6m (roughly $2.125m US).
The injunction was filed in a London court on Tuesday, listing Oasis Partnership, Sony Music and the group’s label, Big Brother Recordings, among its five claimants; defendants listed include the auction house, the engineer and Richards’ son Owain, who arranged the sale of his father’s items. When the auction was first announced, the younger Richards told multiple press outlets that he had previously attempted to sell the archive to the band, but that discussions had broken down, leading to the sale.
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As it stands, if the archive were to be sold, the new owner would only own the physical media itself, as the group would retain IP rights to the recordings’ contents, making any legal public release of the material without the band’s consent virtually impossible.
In the meantime, the rest of the Icons and Artifacts auction will go on as planned—and it will still include a number of Oasis items sourced from Huw Richards, including a guitar, amp, clothing, tour laminates, setlists, tour itineraries, crew gifts, a platinum record award and more.
