Pianists – do you have a spare £200,000 and fancy getting your mitts on a piano once owned by Stevie Nicks that some of Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hits were written on?
The instrument in question is a black Grand Hamilton that is up for auction by the auction house Gotta Have Rock And Roll. The minimum bid is currently US$50,000, but it’s estimated that it will finally go for somewhere between $100,000 or even $200,000. As you can see from the pic, it still looks in pretty good nick.
Its current owner is the English songwriter Robbie Patton, but it was owned by Nicks in the 1970s. When she and Lindsay Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975 it began to go on tour with the band – Christine McVie played it until it was retired from active service in 1983.
Patton claims that two Mac classics – McVie’s Songbird and Nicks’s Sara – were both written on the piano. He acquired it after he co-wrote Hold Me from the band’s 1982 album Mirage. Patton requested the piano as payment and the band were happy to oblige.
Later in the 1980s Patton worked with Elton John and Queen: “Freddie Mercury even came by for a recording session and used the piano,” he says. “Elton John used the piano. The people who have touched this piano are crazy!”
Patton insists that the piano has since been “refurbished and lacquered, but the keys have never been changed. The keys are all original and are the exact keys of which Stevie Nicks used for countless years to compose some of her biggest songs, the same keys that Christine McVie used on stage for Fleetwood Mac during their golden years touring. Even the same keys that Freddie Mercury, Elton John and many more artists used in the studio.”
If you fancy grabbing yourself a piece of music history (and have pockets large enough) you have two weeks to make a bid – the auction closes on December 6.
It’s been a busy week for Fleetwood Mac news. On Wednesday it was announced that Apple Original Films are in the process of developing a new documentary about the band. Director Frank Marshall describes it as an “incredible story of enormous musical achievement” and said “Fleetwood Mac somehow managed to merge their often chaotic and almost operatic personal lives into their own tale in real-time, which then became legend. This will be a film about the music and the people who created it."
However, it has been confirmed that the doc’s timeframe will only start in the mid 1970s when Buckingham and Nicks joined, thus leaving out the whole of Peter Green years and as any devotee of the band knows, a huge number of incredible stories.
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