NEW YORK  –  A guitar used by David Gilmour on six of Pink Floyd’s albums has sold for a record $14.6m (£10.9m), making it the most expensive guitar ever sold, auction house Christie’s has said. Gilmour played the 1969 Fender Stratocaster, nicknamed the ‘Black Strat’, on all of the British rock band’s albums between 1970 and 1983, including The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall.

The guitar sold to an unnamed buyer after 21 minutes of bidding, as part of a rock memorabilia auction in New York on Thursday. A piano owned by the Beatles’ John Lennon also sold at the auction for $3.2 (£2.5m), believed to be the highest fee ever paid for a piece of Beatles memorabilia. Christie’s had estimated the guitar would fetch between $2m and $4m, according to its website. The live auction featured items from the collection of billionaire American businessman Jim Irsay who died in 2025. Julien Pradels, president of Christie’s Americas, said: “Lot after lot, we felt like we were making history.

“The Irsay sale did justice to the brilliance of the collector, and the monumental pieces he brought together – iconic objects that tell the story of our culture and our times.”  Gilmour’s guitar sale surpassed the previous record holder – a retro acoustic-electric 1959 Martin D-18E played by Cobain during Nirvana’s legendary MTV Unplugged performance in 1993, just five months before he died. It sold for $6m (£4.5m) in 2020. Thursday’s auction saw another one of Kurt Cobain’s guitars, a blue Fender Mustang featured in the music video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, sell for $6.9 million (£5.3m).