A nice guitar, but not a rock & roll star
Wednesday, 18 March 2026
Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.
OPINION: We don’t know his name but we can still feel sorry for him. The man - and it has to be a man, doesn’t it? - has just paid US$15 million for a guitar.
It’s a 1969 Fender Stratocaster, nicknamed the Black Strat, which was last auctioned in 2019. Back then it went to the American businessman Jim Irsay for a mere $4m, so it has proved a good investment. But sadly, neither money nor guitars buy time on earth, and Mr Irsay died last year. Now his heirs are selling off his stuff.
What makes the Black Strat desirable is that it belonged to David Gilmour of the rock group Pink Floyd and was used in the recording of all their best-known albums. Prime among these was Dark Side of the Moon which came out when I was at school. Several of my friends bought it, and I remember the cover image of refracted light, but not the music itself. Pink Floyd released The Wall when I was at university. I remember a treble choir singing, “We don’t need no education; we don’t need no thought control”. I still admire the irony.
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So what the anonymous buyer has acquired is a guitar with associations. It’s a guitar that has seen things and been places. Above all it is a guitar that has been touched by rock royalty, and the touch of any form of royalty is significant. In medieval Europe, peasants would kneel before a passing king in the hope that his touch would cure their scrofula.
The royal touch doesn’t seem to have worked for Mr Irsay but there is still no doubt what this guitar is, which is a religious relic of the second class.
(The Catholic church, which is the world authority on relics, defines a second-class relic as being something closely associated with a holy person, whereas a first-class relic is a bit of their body: St Anthony’s tongue, for instance, or the relic of the Holy Circumcision. (Beware the surgeon’s table, Mr Gilmour.) Third class relics, meanwhile, are items that have touched either first or second-class relics so that some of the magic has rubbed off on them. The church allows third-class relics to be sold as souvenirs, which is an idea that the guitar’s new owner may wish to keep in mind.)
But the man’s first problem is what to do with his relic. The church would make it an object of veneration. They’d house it in a reliquary of gold and jewels and once a year they’d parade it through the streets to excite the faithful. But I’m not sure that would work with a guitar.
Indeed, when the man has handed over his 15 million and lugged the thing home and the excitement has worn off, he may find himself suffering buyer’s remorse. The guitar will be mute. If he tries to play it, it will serve only to remind him that, however much money he may have made, he’s not a rock star. And he never will be now because he’s old.
For I guarantee that the owner is of my generation, one who is nostalgic for his youth in the 1970s. Because nothing is so redolent of youth as popular music. The songs that stick in the skull are the ones that played when the hormones raged. The man has tried to buy his past.
But time moves on and popular music with it. Few kids today have heard of Pink Floyd. Another couple of generations and none will. And the $15m guitar will revert to being what it started as, which is just a guitar. The man is weeping over his own grave. You have to sympathise.