David Gilmour’s Strat smashes record for most expensive guitar

David Gilmour’s most famous and iconic guitar once again owns the title of the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction, nearly than tripling the previous record by selling for $14,550,000 including fees.

Today’s Jim Irsay Collection auction at Christie’s in New York was always likely to reset the market for rock star guitars at auction – we dubbed it the world’s greatest guitar collection in 2022, after all.

But with an estimated price of $2-4,000,000, even wild estimates would never have imagined that the guitar – which was bought at auction by the late Indianapolis Colts owner for $3,975,000 in 2019 – would command such an unprecedented price.

The sale makes the Black Strat not only the world’s most expensive guitar again, it more than doubles the previous record held by Kurt Cobain’s Martin D-18E which he used on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance.

That guitar was sold for $6,010,000 in 2020, though interestingly another Kurt Cobain guitar that was also part of the sale and expected to fetch the highest price did relatively modestly by comparison.

Kurt’s Smells Like Teen Spirit video Mustang held the record for the most expensive electric guitar going into the sale, having sold for $4,550,000 in 2022. It sold in the end for ‘only’ $6,907,000.

That still wasn’t good enough for the silver medal on the night however, as another rock star guitar came out of nowhere to become the second most expensive guitar sold at auction.

Interest in the Grateful Dead has exploded over the last few years, and so perhaps it’s no surprise that Jerry Garcia’s legendary Tiger guitar would comfortably beat its $1-2m estimate.

For it to fetch an astounding $14,560,000 however? That certainly wasn’t on the script for the evening.

The sale also saw Eric Clapton’s “Fool” SG sell for a little over $3m, while a treasure trove of Beatles gear also fetched big sums – most notably George Harrison’s Paperback Writer SG which sold for $2,271,000.

Josh is the Commissioning Editor of Guitar.com. He’s responsible for planning most of the reviews and features you see on the site – and writing a fair chunk of them, too. Josh has been on staff at Guitar.com since 2019, having previously worked at Guitar Magazine, Guitarist and Total Guitar. He has an unending fascination with offsets of all shapes and sizes, and rearranging his pedalboard for no real practical reason.