MANIC STREET PREACHERS, SUPER FURRY ANIMALS, CATATONIA and actor RHYS IFANS are amongst the Welsh stars to have donated items to a charity auction to raise funds to send a seriously ill toddler to the US for a life-saving operation, NME.COM can reveal.
The items will go under the hammer in January 2001 in a bid to raise over £100,000 to send Charlotte Speddy to Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. The three-year-old was born with multiple birth defects, which include a severe curve in her spine caused by two missing ribs, two half ribs and three fused ribs, all on the left side. This caused her to bend to the side and as a result, prevented her left lung developing properly, reduced the ability of her right lung to work, and pushing her heart over to the right hand side.
Charlotte needs to undergo a procedure to insert a titanium rib, which will help to straighten her “s”-shaped spine and give her a better quality of life.
Amongst the items set to be auctioned are the shirt worn by James Dean Bradfield on the ‘If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next’ video plus Manic Street Preachers T-shirts and CDs; Cerys Matthews’ first acoustic guitar, plus three signed Catatonia T-shirts, a host of Super Furry Animals curios, including original studio ‘doodles’ drawn by frontman Gruff when recording the ‘Mwng’ album, one of his signed guitars and memorabilia from their 1999 tour of Spain, and also the wetsuit worn by Rhys Ifans in the Hollywood hit ‘Notting Hill’.
The auction will be held at the Bethesda Rugby Club, Gwynedd, North Wales. The exact date and other information including phone lines and email addresses for bidding will be released shortly through [url=]www.north-wales.net/starauction.