George Michael's 'Faith' Guitar Heads to Auction at £60,000–£120,000
A Gretsch Synchromatic 160 acoustic guitar — the same instrument George Michael played in the 1987 "Faith" music video — is headed to auction with an estimate of £60,000–£120,000. The sunburst-finish guitar, kept in a case marked "Rockabilly rebel," is the standout item in a 32-lot sale drawn from the personal archive of Michael's former personal assistant, Siobhan Bailey. The auction takes place on 29 October at Sworders in Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex, with both in-person and online bidding (The Guardian).
Bailey, who died in 2014 at age 56, worked closely with Michael during the height of his solo career. Her widower brought the archive to market. The collection includes gold and platinum discs, tour programmes, private itinerary documents, and personal ephemera — material that together maps the day-to-day operations behind one of Britain's biggest pop careers (The Guardian).
Among the documents are a handwritten notebook kept by Bailey, a running order for 1985's Live Aid concert, and an itinerary for Wham!'s 1985 tour of China. A promotional box set of Michael's 1996 album Older, never released to the public, carries an estimate of £300–£600. A metal lighthouse statue given to Michael by Malaga city council in 1989 is expected to fetch £200–£400. Personal invitations Michael received — including one to a reception hosted by the TV soap EastEnders and another to a 2002 lunch with David and Victoria Beckham — round out the collection. One lot comprises 49 photographs, some taken by Bailey and previously unseen (The Guardian).
The Bailey archive is not the only Michael memorabilia reaching the market this autumn. Ray-Ban sunglasses worn by Michael on the Faith tour are expected to sell for £15,000–£30,000 at the Music Memorabilia Live auction in London on 1 and 2 October (The Guardian). That sale follows the May auction of the leather jacket Michael wore in the same "Faith" video, which sold for £176,400 in Chenies against a pre-sale estimate of £60,000–£120,000 (BBC News). The jacket had been offered alongside a guitar belonging to Slash, pointing to a broader appetite for iconic music memorabilia (Mirror).
The jacket's final price nearly tripled its upper estimate — a figure worth noting as the Gretsch guitar enters the market with an identical pre-sale range. Auction estimates for celebrity-owned instruments are notoriously inexact, driven by how specifically an item can be tied to a famous owner and the cultural weight of the moment it represents. The Faith-era jacket and now the guitar both connect directly to one of the defining solo debuts of the late 1980s. The guitar's case inscription, "Rockabilly rebel," ties it to the 1950s rock-and-roll visual style Michael adopted for the video. Whether the instrument commands the same premium as the jacket depends on collector demand for playable memorabilia versus costume pieces — two related but distinct segments of the market.
Items from the Bailey archive will go on public display at Sworders' London branch from 20 to 27 October before the full sale on 29 October.
