£1 guitar being sold for £1.25 million!

A guitar bought for Alvin Stardust to learn to play on for just £1.50 when he was a young boy is now worth more than one million pounds – because  Buddy Holly and The Crickets, John Lennon, Paul MaCartney, The Rolling Stones, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Chuck Berry put their signiture on it.

The 71-year-old star told a BBC Radio 2 programme how his parents gave him the guitar for his 12th birthday, in 1954. “It cost £1 10 shillings, about £1.50 in today’s money,” he says. “Although it was not a full-size acoustic, to me it was the best guitar in the world. After about a fortnight I had roughly learned a couple of chords.”

Back in 1958, Alvin saw an advert for a concert with Buddy Holly and The Crickets at a cinema in Doncaster, and went up there from his Mansfield home on the bus, taking the guitar with him.

There were around two-thousand people standing around the cinema but, because he had brought his guitar, “a path opened up for me”. Then a kindly staff  helped him go to meet the group in their dressing room. They ended up singing Holly’s hit Peggy Sue with him and signed his guitar, because there was a pencil available, but no paper. He was given the best seat in the theatre, and when he return to Mansfield he called the guitar ‘Peggy Sue’. “From that moment, and for over 50 years since, Peggy Sue has stuck, and I love it,” he says.

Next to sign the guitar was Bill Haley, followed by Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, then when Stardust started to tour, under the name Shane Fenton, he received the signatures of acts he was on the road with, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Joe Brown. The autographs of The Beatles and Rolling Stones were to follow and Stardust says the guitar that was bought for £1 and 10 shillings has recently been insured for £1.25 million.

The legendary Alvin Stardust plays a very special acoustic version of his classic Glam Rock hit “My Coo Ca Choo”