Omega Auctions, a specialist auction house in Newton-le-Willows, has seen extraordinary music memorabilia pass through its doors, from a Beatles autograph hidden in a drawer to David Bowie's earliest recordings forgotten in a bread basket in a loft. Founded in 2010 by husband-and-wife team Karen and Paul Fairweather, the company specialises in music memorabilia and vinyl, including records, posters, tickets, autographs, and more unusual pieces of music history.
Alongside John Lennon's tooth, the team has helped sell houses connected to The Beatles, including George Harrison's childhood home in Speke and John Lennon's mum's house in Allerton. Director of operations Dan Muscatelli-Hampson said the human stories behind the items are often the most fascinating part of the job.
Stories behind the items
The 35-year-old, originally from Derbyshire but now living in Childwall, told the ECHO: "We deal with all the weird and wonderful but the human stories behind the things that we sell are the most interesting part of it. Obviously, the prices that they sell for are interesting too, but the people who've collected them, it's the fascinating part of it really."
Dan, who has worked at Omega for almost 10 years, said collections arrive through a whole range of routes. Some are inherited when family members die, with relatives only discovering afterward that a parent or grandparent had quietly amassed valuable music memorabilia. He said: "It's literally everybody from all over the world, and everyone's got a different story. We've had people whose parents never mentioned that they had, you know, a Beatles autograph tucked away in a drawer or whatever it may be."
Internet changes auction approach
Others are specialist collectors who know exactly what they own and wait for the right moment to sell. Then there are the unexpected discoveries, including people who have found valuable records or memorabilia in charity shops or at car boot sales. Dan said: "We've had people who've been very successful with that down the years as well. So it's the full range really."
Omega also deals with international clients, including Americans who want to sell their collections in the UK market. Once an item arrives, the team appraises, prices, catalogues, describes, and photographs the items before they go under the hammer. Valuing them is a combination of experience and hard data, looking at previous sales and considering factors such as the artist's popularity and rarity.
Dan said the internet has changed the way people approach the auction house. Before the internet, there were far more occasions when people were genuinely shocked to discover what something was worth. Now, people can search for items themselves, although the rise of AI has created a new problem, with people arriving with AI-generated valuations that can be "10 to 20 times as much" as the actual value of their items.
Extraordinary discoveries
Dan said: "We're now seeing AI acting as a sort of first port of call for people whenever they have anything, and it's not at a level yet where it's accurate. So people often come in with very high expectations, and then we have to do a bit of deflating."
But every so often, someone really does walk through the door with something extraordinary. A man had been in an early band with Bowie, The Konrads, and had kept some of the band's earliest recordings. Rather than being carefully preserved in a specialist archive, they ended up in a bread basket in his loft. The man later moved to Australia and almost forgot about them. Many years later the recordings were discovered and eventually sold for tens of thousands of pounds.
Dan said: "That was a really fun one. It's nice when it's something that had seemed insignificant to someone, so much so that they'd put it away and just completely forgotten about it, and then it's tens of thousands of pounds."
Spectacular signed album
Another remarkable item has recently arrived at Omega and is due to go under the hammer on Tuesday. In the 1990s, a man landed a job working on The Beatles' Anthology project, which brought together previously unseen footage of the band. While working on the project, he bought a copy of The Beatles' White Album and took it with him when he met the band members.
He managed to get it signed by Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, but he didn't stop there. The album also carries signatures from a host of people connected to The Beatles, including George Martin, Allan Williams, Astrid Kirchherr, Yoko Ono, and John's son Sean Lennon. Dan described it as one of the most spectacular items he has seen during his time at Omega.
It has been estimated at between £5,000 and £10,000, although Dan said it could reach £20,000. Dan said: "It's definitely a unique factor. A normal copy of The Beatles' White Album, if we use that as an example, sold hundreds of thousands of copies or more, and there are lots of them around. But something like that, which you can reasonably say no one else in the world is going to have - that album with that collection of autographs on - that's when we see the collectors really come out, and the fighting really begins."
The same principle applied to a set of David Bowie's handwritten lyrics for Starman, which Dan saw sold for around £165,000. He said: "It was the same thing really, whereby there might potentially be one or two other examples of him having written out Starman, but this was an almost unique item."
Between two musical cities
For an auction house based in Newton-le-Willows, its location puts it within reach of two of Britain's most famous musical cities. Dan said the company is proud to be based between Liverpool and Manchester, and its auctions reflect both sides of the North West's musical heritage. Alongside its Beatles sales, Omega has handled collections connected to Manchester's music scene, including The Smiths, Oasis, The Haçienda, and Factory Records.
Dan said: "We're really proud to be situated where we are, halfway between Liverpool and Manchester. You get access to incredible collections relating to both places. We really like being where we are between those places. Literally every day is different. You walk in not knowing what you're going to see, who you're going to speak to, or what might turn up on your desk. There's a lot of graft that goes into it, but it's just really worth it, and it's an amazing job."
