Tom Dunne: Guitar porn and the things I could spend my money on 

If at any point Irsay, or someone like him, is heard to say the words “I just fucking love Rory Gallagher” we are in trouble. A bidding war between “one of the State’s cultural institutions” and someone like Orsay could make the Dáil bike shed look like a middle-row Aldi bargain.

Gilmour’s black Strat was the one played on ‘Comfortably Numb’, ‘Money’ and ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’. Irsay, at the same auction, also paid over $175k for its flight case, and over $1 million for Gilmour’s 1969 Martin D-35, played on ‘Wish you Were Here’.

The online music memorabilia auction is not for the faint-hearted. When Paul McCartney’s missing Hofner bass appeared to be briefly in play last year, erroneously as it turned out, experts predicted it would fetch $6m to $10m at auction. That would have been a world record.

However, it was suggested, that if two owners of any of the big seven tech companies could be tempted to wade in competitively that bidding would change out of recognition. In a bidding war, with participants whose companies make billions, bids in the $50m to $60m range were predicted. When it comes to classic guitars, the sky is the limit.

Many of the “most collectible” guitars were acquired before the most recent round of truly inflated pricing. The guitar Elvis played at the Sun Recording sessions from 1954 to 1956, a 1942 Martin D28, only achieved $1.3m. It had been predicted to command $3m.

Equally, the electric guitar Bob Dylan carried with him onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, a 1964 Fender Strat, was a bargain at $965k when sold at auction to, you guessed, Jim Irsay, in 2013. That was the guitar that would inspire an audience member to shout “Judas” at the Manchester Free Trade Hall a while later.

Dylan playing ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Maggie’s Farm’ on that guitar is seen as a watershed moment in rock history. Yet, when Dylan left it behind on a private jet, he never went back for it. If that or Elvis’s D28 were to come to auction now, records would be obliterated.

Gilmour’s instruments are amongst the most collectible on earth. Three of his guitars are in the Top 15 most expensive sold at auction ever. Anything touched by Eric Clapton does well too, and John Lennon’s old guitars, a Gibson J-130E and a Framus Hootenanny 12-string, both sold for over $2m.

But the man whose guitars are the most collectible on the planet is Kurt Cobain. A Fender Mustang that he played on the In Utero tour and album, including the last show in Munich in March 1994, sold to a Japanese businessman for $1.587m.

The Nirvana frontman also owned the two most expensive guitars in history. In second place is the Lake Placid Blue Fender Mustang he played in the ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ video. That video is routinely described as having changed the direction of popular music in 1990. I can’t disagree with that. He said it wasn’t his favourite, but it was still acquired by Jim Orsay for $4.55 million in 2022.

And top of the list is the acoustic Martin D-18 as played by Cobain at the legendary MTV Unplugged performance on November 28, 1983. He had paid $5,000 for it a year earlier at Voltage Guitars in LA. At auction in 2020, Peter Freedman, RØDE microphones founder, shelved out a cool $6,010, 000.

The guitar had been left to Kurt’s daughter Bean, but sadly had been surrendered as part of her divorce settlement with ex-husband Isaiah Silva. There is a cautionary tale there too horrible to countenance.

So where does this leave Rory’s 1961 Strat? Well, it depends on who is in the room and more importantly who is online. But $1m for a guitar played by a man that Jimi Hendrix name-checked as being better than him, just might be a steal.