Rare Röyksopp ‘Melody A.M.’ vinyl with Banksy cover sells for £3,720 at auction
A rare copy of Röyksopp's 2001 debut album 'Melody A.M.', featuring cover art spray-painted by Banksy, has sold for £3,720 at auction through Wessex Auction Rooms. The sale highlights how much value Banksy's involvement adds to an item, with the auctioneer noting the price reflected the artwork rather than the record's condition or the band's popularity.
The Norwegian duo sent Banksy 100 blank sleeves in 2002, which he customised using a bespoke green stencil design. A local street-art collector, who had initially missed the lot, secured this copy after offering £3,000 before it eventually sold for £3,720; another Banksy-covered copy previously fetched $10,465.10 (£8,477.25) on Discogs in 2019, making it one of the most expensive vinyl records ever sold.
- Banksy-designed Röyksopp vinyl sold for £3,720 at auction
- Banksy spray-painted 100 sleeves for the 2002 edition
- A similar copy sold for over £8,000 in 2019
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Röyksopp are a Norwegian electronic music duo whose 2001 debut album, 'Melody A.M.', became a landmark record in that genre. Banksy is a famously anonymous British street artist known for stencil-based graffiti, whose work has since become highly sought after by collectors and can fetch enormous sums whenever it appears, even on unusual items.
In 2002 the band asked Banksy to customise a batch of 100 blank record sleeves by hand, giving those particular copies of the album a unique, artist-decorated cover. Because Banksy's identity and output are so closely guarded and collectible, items bearing his work, however small or unofficial, tend to command prices far beyond what the object would normally be worth.
This matters because it shows how a piece of music memorabilia can become extraordinarily valuable purely through association with a well-known artist, blurring the line between record collecting and art collecting. Auction houses and collectors closely track such sales as indicators of Banksy's market value and cultural reach.