There’s going to be a feeling of loss but a huge sense of relief… I’ve had my time with them. I’m finding new friends now and they can move on”: When David Gilmour auctioned 123 of his guitars for charity

Just before he raised a record-breaking $21.5m, the veteran axe hero showed and played some of the historic instrument’s he’d decided to part with

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In 2019 David Gilmour made the shock announcement that he’d decided to sell 123 of his guitars at auction, many of them legendary among Pink Floyd fans. The move led to all kinds of speculation about his future. He’d eventually raise $21.5m (about £16.6m) for the ClientEarth charity in a record-breaking event; but before it took place, he talked – and played – through some of the unique lots with Prog, and offered some hope for those who feared he might be retiring.

“I’ve no intention of going and doing a Pink Floyd record or a Pink Floyd tour again.” Words from the mouth of David Gilmour that won’t come as a massive surprise to fans, but are still likely to be met by a sinking of many hearts in Progland. Earlier in 2019, the guitarist also announced he was selling around 120 of his own guitars to raise money for charity, a collection that includes the legendary Black Strat that was used on all Floyd albums from 1970 to the mid-80s, and again at the Live 8 reunion; the equally legendary 0001 Strat; and Gilmour’s 1955 Les Paul Goldtop that was used on both The Wall and A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

One can understand a certain frisson of fear creeping through the Floyd/Gilmour fanbase. What on earth is going on, Mr Gilmour? Does selling so many guitars equate to an announcement of retirement for a man whose guitar tone has coloured the lives of millions of music fans the world over?

Christies, the auction house reselling the Gilmour collection, said his guitar solos were “both lyrical and layered with color, and immediately identifiable to critics and pop music fans as readily as the brushstrokes of Monet’s water lilies are to art historians.” For many (Prog’s editor, for example), the solo in Comfortably Numb remains the finest moment of the finest song on the finest album ever.

“There’s a purpose to what’s going on here,” Gilmour says. “We’re selling the guitars – it’ll do good. I could do without one or two guitars here and there; one or two guitars that I use less. I think, ‘Just do it. Get it done.’ If I find that I need something, I’ll hunt down the person that bought it and buy it back, or I’ll buy another one that’s almost identical. The second option’s much more likely.”

Gilmour is, of course, no stranger to grandiose charitable gestures. In 2003 he sold his £3.6 million house in London’s Little Venice to Earl Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, and gave the proceeds to the homeless charity Crisis, for whom he acts as a vice president. He once donated £25,000 to the Save The Rhino foundation at the behest of Douglas Adams, in return for the author’s invention of album title The Division Bell.

And yet there’s something inherently more personal about a guitar collection: instruments through which this mercurial musician has coloured some of the rock world’s most memorable moments – moments of personal triumph even, in the ongoing battle for the heart of Pink Floyd. Even if Gilmour’s words hint at a continuation of making music, there seems something horribly definite about selling so many of the things that connect him to music lovers the world over

Watch David Gilmour's Possible Last 'Comfortably Numb' Performance

“These are instruments that have served me very well,” he says. “They have given me music, I’ve loved them, but now it’s time for them to go off and be part of someone else’s musical life. I’m hoping they’ll inspire music in other people. And selling them will hopefully give a fair bit of cash to a number of charities which are in deep need of that cash right at this moment.”

Let’s start with the Black Strat. How old is this instrument?

The Black Strat – my main tool of the trade for the last… God knows how long. I believe it was made in 1969 and I bought it at Manny’s in 48th Street New York in 1970. And it’s been on most Pink Floyd recordings from then up into the 80s, when I put it out to pasture for a while. But then I brought it back again and it’s still the guitar I play more than any other.

Manny’s was fantastic; a brilliant shop. The guy who ran it was called Henry, not Manny. He was a great guy; he would troop off to a back room and dig out a guitar and say, ‘Try this!’ We mostly got new guitars from Manny’s; he had the pick of the crop.

Quite a bit, yes. In Cambridge when I was a teenager and there was no way I could afford a Fender of any sort, there was a music shop called Ken Stevens; I used to spend a lot of time in it. It was a miniature shop – one of those ones where it was only half the width of a usual shopfront, probably only seven or eight foot wide. But there were guitars all the way down both sides, and there was a Stratocaster hanging in there for years, which we sometimes persuaded the guy in the shop to let us touch and play a tune or two on. But I could never afford it.

When you’re in a music shop, when you’re testing out a guitar, what do you play? People will go into guitar shops and test guitars by playing your stuff!

I haven’t been into a guitar shop for quite a while – it’s not the way it works any more. My people talk to their people and the guitars come and you play them and put them back in the box and send them away. There are places in England where they have a range of beautiful old guitars that you can go and see and play and buy. One is an acoustic place I’m going to go to quite soon, with a bit of luck, in Kent.