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‘When they cleared the wreckage, it was all that survived’: 10 of history’s most irreplaceable guitars

As Paul McCartney is reunited with his violin-shaped Hofner bass, we look at equally iconic guitars, from Prince’s phallic symbol to Jimmy Page’s double-necked beast

Prince was both a dream and a nightmare for a luthier – astonishingly talented, he would also fling guitars around for some poor stage hand to catch (as at his peerlessly casual yet brilliant 2004 performance honouring George Harrison). King was playing in a dance hall in the too-perfectly named town of Twist, in Arkansas, and a fire began after two men, fighting over a woman called Lucille, knocked over a barrel of burning fuel that was heating the building. With basslines played with fingers and melodies with thumbs, from this inverted style poured what writer Daphne A Brooks has called “the music of a Black girl’s lifeworld”.

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