From today's Times. The luxury section! Sorry about the formatting and absence of the pictures - it's not that easy to copy'n'paste out of The Times website.
Would you like to own one of Mark Knopfler’s guitars?
For an estimated £1 million you can buy 113 of them at the musician’s upcoming charity auction
Mark Knopfler playing a Pensa guitar in Dire Straits in 1991
MICK HUTSON/REDFERNS
Simon de Burton
Friday January 26 2024, 12.01am, The Times
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Shortly before my 14th birthday in 1978, I inherited £250 from a great-aunt I had never met. If I had used it to buy Coca-Cola shares, then trading at 20p, that £250 would today be worth more than £55,000.
But I didn’t buy Coca-Cola shares.
Instead, I asked my mother to drive me to Debenhams where I went to the home entertainment department and blew £249.99 on a Sanyo music centre, splashing out another £2.49 to buy the debut LP by a band everyone was talking about called Dire Straits.
Knopfler playing a Schecter guitar in 1991
I then spent hours each evening, sitting in semi-darkness absorbing Mark Knopfler’s smoky voice, marvelling at the poetry of the album’s lyrics (“Now my conductress on the No 19, she was a honey. Pink toe nails and hands all dirty with the money”) and truly discovering music.
There must have been thousands of others of my age doing precisely the same thing — which suggests that there will be no shortage of baby boomer and Generation X bidders at Christie’s in London on Wednesday, January 31, when 113 guitars and 10 amplifiers belonging to the now 74-year-old Knopfler cross the block in a single-owner sale that is (very) conservatively estimated to raise more than £1 million.
According to Kerry Keane, a musical instruments consultant at Christie’s in the US, the Knopfler auction will be a match for other sell-offs by guitar greats, such as the collections of Eric Clapton (101 guitars, three guitar straps and two amplifiers sold in 1999 for $5 million, 88 more in 2004 for $7.4 million) and David Gilmour (122 guitars, one guitar case and two amplifiers, $21.5 million in 2019).
Knopfler’s guitars: a Fender, 2002; Gibson, 1983; Pensa Suhr, 1988; Gibson, 1959
Knopfler’s lots span the star’s 50-year career and include guitars that introduced Dire Straits fans to the jingly-jangly quick-picking combination of blues, rock, country and folk that became his trademark through tracks such as Down to the Waterline, Setting Me Up and Sultans of Swing (although the 1961 Fender Stratocaster used on the original recording of the last isn’t up for grabs).
But there’s no shortage of other great instruments. How about the 1983 Les Paul Standard ’59 reissue used to record the title track and Money for Nothing on the 1985 album Brothers in Arms? Estimated to fetch between £10,000 to £15,000. The red Schecter Telecaster that Knopfler bought the previous year and used to record Walk of Life? £4,000 to £6,000. The 1988 Pensa-Suhr MK-1 that was especially built for the frontman to play at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday tribute concert in Wembley Stadium? £6,000 to £8,000.
Schecter, 1983; Gibson, 1985; Gibson, 1958
The star of the auction, however, is likely to be the 1959 Vintage Les Paul Standard used on the Sailing to Philadelphia tour of 2001, the Kill to Get Crimson tour of 2008 and for multiple live performances of Brothers in Arms. Even without the Knopfler connection, a 1959 Les Paul Standard is a valuable collector’s item (in the early days of Dire Straits, the star could only afford a modern re-issue) and this example, which he has owned for more than 20 years, is tipped to realise up to £500,000.
The rise in value of artist-owned guitars — and rock’n’roll memorabilia in general — can be traced back to 1990, when Sotheby’s sold the Fender Stratocaster played by Jimi Hendrix at the Woodstock festival in 1969 for an unprecedented £198,000.
Back then, corporate buyers — notably the Hard Rock Café restaurant chain — were key in driving up prices for music memorabilia, leading to sales such as that of the famous painted drum skin from the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album fetching more than £540,000, Bob Dylan’s hand-written lyrics for Like a Rolling Stone making £1.2 million, and the Steinway Z piano on which John Lennon wrote Imagine, which was bought by George Michael for £1.45 million.
According to Amelia Walker, Christie’s head of iconic collections, the buyer demographic has changed dramatically since those first auction milestones of the Nineties.
“The market has expanded to become far more global than it was back then,” she explains. “The Gilmour guitar sale demonstrated that, while the US is still the biggest market for rock’n’roll memorabilia, there are now buyers in Asia, the Middle East and many other parts of the world from which we wouldn’t have previously seen participation.”
One of the keys to the value of music memorabilia is provenance, which has to be cast iron. Knopfler’s collection (like Clapton’s and Gilmour’s before it) has been consigned direct from source, which makes it hugely desirable.
“The fact that this collection is being sold by Mark Knopfler not only gives buyers the assurance that every lot is of impeccable provenance, it adds a whole extra layer of appeal — these guitars have all been his companions and his tools of the trade, and the interest being shown in from people of all ages shows how the music of Dire Straits has crossed generations,” Walker says.
“There is probably no Dire Straits fan on earth who would not want to be able to play a Sultans of Swing solo on one of these instruments,” she adds.
And, as it turns out, part of the reason Knopfler is selling is that he wants other musicians to enjoy the guitars with which he has carved his career and to keep on using them.
He is also hoping to raise a substantial amount of money for three charities — the British Red Cross, Tusk, and Brave Hearts of the North East — to which he has pledged 25 per cent of the hammer price of each lot sold.
Estimates start at as little as £1,000, with many instruments being offered in the £2,000 to £6,000 range. But don’t expect too many bargains.
“It is very difficult to quantify the value of celebrity provenance, so the large majority of lots have been given estimates that roughly represent their retail value,” Walker says.
If only I had bought Coca-Cola shares instead of that Sanyo, I would certainly have been among the bidders.
But at least my Dire Straits album has gone up in value — according to the online dealer Rare Vinyl, it’s now worth £26.99.
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