Rock legend Jeff Beck’s guitar sells for almost $2m at Christie’s auction

The 1954 Gibson Les Paul ‘Oxblood’ that appeared on the cover of Jeff Beck’s 1975 solo album Blow By Blow has sold for nearly $2m at auction.

Jeff Beck performing in 1977 in Santa Monica, California Picture: Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage

A guitar played by Jeff Beck has sold for £1m ($1.96m) at auction.

Christie’s is this month putting on sale more than 130 of Beck’s guitars, which he played throughout his career, from joining the Yardbirds in March 1965 to his last tour in 2022.

Among the instruments being sold at the auction, Jeff Beck: The Guitar Collection, was the 1954 Gibson Les Paul “Oxblood” that appeared on the cover of his 1975 solo album Blow By Blow and which he played during an appearance with David Bowie in 1973. It sold on Thursday for more than twice its estimate of £500,000.

Beck died aged 78 in January 2023 after a career that saw him earn eight Grammy awards and work with the likes of Ozzy ­Osbourne and Mick Jagger.

Amelia Walker, director of Christie’s and specialist head of the private and iconic collections department, said Beck was “regarded as one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time”.

“This [collection] is a really important chronology of Jeff’s life and career in music,” she said, adding that one of the earliest guitars in the collection was the Gibson Les Paul “Yardburst”, which Beck “bought in 1966 when he was in the Yardbirds and which he played for the next seven or eight years, both in the Yardbirds with the first Jeff Beck Group, with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, and then with the second Jeff Beck Group.

“It was a guitar that was [also] played by Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix on stage. So that in itself makes it a unique piece of music history.”

She added: “Each guitar bears the scars of [Beck’s] playing. He played these guitars hard, he wasn’t a collector, these were his tools. They were his means of communicating his emotions and his music to the world.”

A 1954 Sunburst Fender Stratocaster, given to Beck by Small Faces frontman Steve Marriott, was expected to fetch up to £80,000 but sold for £302,000.

A Pink Jackson Soloist signed by Tina Turner also sold for £441,000, while a guitar nicknamed Anoushka after the sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar who signed it, sold for £1m – despite an estimate of just £30,000.

The most expensive rock guitar yet sold at auction belonged to Kurt Cobain. The Nirvana frontman played the 1959 Martin D-18E during the band’s performance on MTV Unplugged in 1993, five months before his death. It was bought in 2020 by Peter Freedman, the founder of Rode microphones, for $US6,010,000.

According to reports, Lloyd Chiate, owner of Voltage Guitars, the Los Angeles store from which Cobain had bought the instrument, attended the auction to see it off. Chiate said he had bought the Martin from a pawn shop in the American south for $US3500, before selling it to Cobain for $US5000.

The Times