George Michael's Faith guitar fetches £180,000 after family row

Well above the estimate

The guitar George Michael played in the video for Faith in 1987 has fetched £180,000 at auction, after a row over the sale of memorabilia kept by the singer's long-time personal assistant, Katie Razzall and Helen Bushby reported for the BBC.

The guitar led 32 lots auctioned by Sworders on Thursday 29 October from the collection of Siobhan Bailey, who worked for Michael for 20 years. The whole sale took £238,000, not counting the buyer's premium.

That was well above the estimate. When the sale was announced in September, the auction house expected the guitar to reach between £60,000 and £120,000, Ben Beaumont-Thomas reported for The Guardian. The auction was held online and in person at Sworders in Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex, after the items went on show at its London branch from 20 to 27 October.

Katie Razzall and Helen Bushby reported this first for BBC News. Checked against BBC News: George Michael's Faith guitar sells for £180k after auction row.

The family's objection

Bailey died suddenly of natural causes in 2014, aged 56. She was in the process of divorcing her husband, Ian Belcher, but was still legally married to him, and she did not leave a will. Her estate, including the items, passed to him, and it was Belcher who put them up for sale, the BBC reported.

Her brother, Gerard Bailey, told the BBC she "would be horrified" at an auction held in her name. In a letter to the auction house seen by the BBC, he said the family regarded the sale as a "breach of [Siobhan's] privacy", and called the use of her name "disingenuous" and "wholly unethical".

He said his sister had begun to draw up a will shortly before she died, which would have left the items to her nieces and nephews, but it was never registered. If she had lived a few weeks longer, he said, Belcher would not have been considered her next of kin.

Speaking before the sale, he said she "would never have consented" and that the auction "breaks my heart". He accused Belcher of deciding to cash in 12 years after her death. He asked for the auction to be stopped, or at least held in Belcher's name rather than hers.

The BBC stressed that there is no suggestion Belcher did not have the right to sell the items, because her estate passed to him legally, and Gerard Bailey accepted that. Belcher declined to comment.

The auction house's view

Guy Schooling, the chairman of Sworders, said Belcher had been "nothing but delightful" in their dealings over two and a half years. He told BBC News there were two ways of looking at the sale, as cashing in or as a memorial and tribute to Siobhan, and that the auction house had taken the second view.

Sworders billed the 32 lots as a remarkable group of memorabilia from the collection of George Michael's long-time personal assistant and trusted confidante, the BBC reported.

Twenty years beside a star

Siobhan Bailey started working for Michael in 1984, the year Wham! had their first Number 1 single with Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. She stayed for two decades. Her brother said she kept out of the limelight and guarded the singer's privacy, despite tabloid journalists hoping for stories.

"I think she was one of the few people George trusted and whose opinion he valued," Gerard Bailey told the BBC. He said she was always honest and straight with Michael, which was why she stayed so long, through the very good and the not so good times.

The guitar, he said, was a gift, because the singer thought so much of her. She was proud of her personalised gold and platinum discs, though very modest about them. He said the family would never have sold her possessions, and that it felt "tawdry" for her Filofax and notes from George to be put up for sale.

The guitar that launched a solo career

The guitar is a Gretsch Synchromatic 160 acoustic with a sunburst body, The Guardian reported. Its case carries the words Rockabilly Rebel, a nod to the twangy, 1950s sound of Faith, which spent four weeks at the top of the US chart and became a foundation stone of Michael's solo career after Wham!.

It played a big part in his change from teen pop idol to serious solo artist. In the Faith video Michael wore ripped blue Levi's, a white T-shirt and a black leather biker jacket, and strummed the vintage guitar, which he reportedly picked up in a shop in Los Angeles shortly before filming, the BBC reported. Guitarist magazine recently called it arguably the most famous Gretsch Synchromatic in the world.

The Faith album is widely seen as one of the defining pop records of the 1980s, with more than 25 million sales worldwide and four US Number 1 singles, Faith, Father Figure, One More Try and Monkey, Owen Myers reported for The Guardian. Alan McGee wrote for the paper that Michael co-produced it, wrote all the songs, played most of the instruments and sang the backing vocals and harmonies himself.

What else was in the sale

After the guitar, which came with its original hard case and leather strap, the BBC listed the highest prices. A sleeve for Queen's Five Live EP, signed by Brian May, John Deacon, Roger Taylor, George Michael and Lisa Stansfield, reached £7,000. A ring-bound itinerary from Michael's 1988 Faith world tour reached £5,000.

A presentation CD of his 1996 album Older reached £4,800, a gold disc for Wham!'s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go £4,500, and a gold disc for I Want Your Sex £4,200.

Other lots included a note written "with love and admiration" from Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, an official Wham! photograph signed "To Siobhan (Special...)" and an invitation to Ridgeley's 21st birthday party.

The Guardian described other papers from the archive when the sale was announced: private itineraries for Wham! and George Michael tours, one of Bailey's handwritten notebooks, a running order for Live Aid in 1985, and an itinerary for Wham!'s 1985 visit to China. There were invitations to a reception held by the soap EastEnders and to a lunch with David and Victoria Beckham in 2002, a metal lighthouse statue presented to Michael by Malaga city council in 1989, and a set of 49 photographs, some taken by Bailey and never seen before.

Wham! in China

That China itinerary belongs to one of the strangest chapters in Michael's career. In 1985 Wham! became the first western pop act to play in mainland China, with concerts in Beijing and Guangzhou, a coup arranged by their manager Simon Napier-Bell after months of talks with Communist party officials. He hoped the publicity would help them break America, and it did, Peter Bradshaw wrote for The Guardian.

The director Lindsay Anderson was hired to film the trip, but clashed with the band's team and was fired afterwards. A re-edited version of the footage, Wham! 10 Days in China, came out this summer, with new interviews with surviving participants, most prominently Ridgeley. Bradshaw called it a strange and riveting moment in pop and political history.

Ten years on

The sale comes as the tenth anniversary of Michael's death approaches in December, and with a wider revival of interest in the Faith era, The Guardian noted. A separate pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses that Michael wore on the Faith tour was offered with an estimate of £15,000 to £30,000 at the Music Memorabilia Live auction in London in early October.

A concert film, George Michael: The Faith Tour, is due in cinemas on 6 November. It is built from rediscovered footage of a 1988 show at the Bercy arena in Paris, shot on 14 35mm cameras, and is co-directed by Andy Morahan, who directed the Faith video, and David Austin, Michael's childhood friend who now runs his estate.

It will be shown with a short film by Mary McCartney that pairs unseen photographs of Michael by Herb Ritts with an interview never heard before. An 18-track live album of the same name, including previously unreleased Wham! recordings, comes out alongside it.

Other archive projects have surfaced this year. In July Andros Georgiou, a childhood friend whose father was a cousin of Michael's father, released 90 minutes of studio footage from Trojan Souls, an unfinished 1992 duets project with stars including Aretha Franklin and Bryan Ferry, Dorian Lynskey reported for The Guardian. Only one song from it, This Kind of Love with Elton John, was ever completed.

The sessions began almost by accident, Lynskey wrote. In January 1992 Michael and Georgiou were in Los Angeles when Michael suggested recording a quick cover of the 1979 disco hit Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now at Dave Stewart's studio in Encino. Michael then decided to make a whole album, recruiting singers he had loved growing up. That October he sued Sony, his record label, arguing that his contract was an unreasonable restraint of trade. The project faded as his partner, Anselmo Feleppa, became seriously ill, and Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now was eventually released in 1998 as one of the first commercially available MP3s.

The Faith Tour film is the latest from Morahan and Austin, who also directed the 2017 documentary George Michael: Freedom, about his early hunger for fame and later disillusionment with the music industry. Michael was finishing that film when he died, Myers reported for The Guardian. Since then his estate has worked with Nile Rodgers on a new version of his 1990 B-side Fantasy, and in 2019 the romantic comedy Last Christmas was built around his and Wham!'s songs.

His songs have rarely left the charts. Wham!'s Last Christmas was the UK Christmas Number 1 in 2023 and 2024, before Kylie Minogue's Xmas took the spot in 2025, and Father Figure trended on TikTok after it was used in the Nicole Kidman film Babygirl, The Guardian reported.

Michael grew up in Hertfordshire and found fame with Ridgeley in Wham! before solo hits including Faith, Careless Whisper, Father Figure, Outside and Fastlove. He died in 2016.