Money, it’s a gas—and it took a staggering $14.5 million for David Gilmour’s black Fender Stratocaster to become the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction.
The record-shattering instrument was purchased by an anonymous online buyer last week after a 21-minute bidding battle hosted by Christie’s auction house in New York. The historic sale smashed the previous record of $6.01 million set in 2020 by the buyer of the Martin D-18E guitar that Kurt Cobain played on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance just months before his death in 1994.
While that Cobain guitar is undeniably iconic, the provenance and history of Gilmour’s “Black Strat” is hard to top. The singer/guitarist used it to record legendary riffs and scorching solos on five classic Pink Floyd albums from 1972 to 1983, including The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You were Were, Animals, The Wall andThe Final Cut. Gilmour put his signature axe aside for more than 20 years in favor of another Strat, but used it again in 2014 to record Pink Floyd’s final album, The Endless River.
Gilmour bought his fabled Black Strat across the street from Christie’s Rockefeller Plaza auction house at Manny’s Music in 1970. “It’s been on most Pink Floyd recordings from then up into the 80s, when I put it out to pasture for a while,” Gilmour told Louderin 2019. “But then I brought it back again, and it’s still the guitar I play more than any other.”
The guitar was part of Christie’s Jim Irsay Collection amassed by the billionaire Indianapolis Colts owner before his death last year. (He bought Gilmour’s guitar in 2019 from Christie’s for just over $5 million.) Irsay’s collection was heavy on famous rock guitars—including those owned by Cobain, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia and Paul McCartney—along with literary and pop culture ephemera like Jack Kerouac’s original typescript scroll of On The Road and a cherry-red 1973 Chevrolet Caprice Classic owned by Hunter S. Thompson.
Gilmour’s guitar wasn’t the only instrument that left the auction’s well-heeled bidders “Comfortably Numb.” The guitar that Cobain used in Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video sold for $6.9 million, setting a new record for a Cobain collector’s item. Garcia, the late lead guitarist and singer for the Grateful Dead, also notched a record for his estate when his custom “Tiger” guitar sold for $11.56 million.
