A “heavy metal” musician from Tampa (west coast of Florida) named Prince Midnight has decided to honor his dear uncle Filip, who died in Greece more than 20 years ago, using his bones to build the first “Skelecaster” electric guitar.
A YouTube video, seen by more than 200,000 users, shows the musician wearing a black leather jacket sitting on an amplifier while playing the guitar built from his uncle’s remains.
“The skeleton belonged to my dear Uncle Philip, who died in the 1990s and, due to a series of events, his remains were repatriated to the United States from Greece and came into my possession,” Prince Midnight wrote on the channel’s website.
According to the rocker, his uncle was the person who introduced him to the “heavy metal” genre, his musical mentor has now turned into an electric guitar: a neck that appears to be from a Telecaster supports his ribs and is extended by a part of his uncle’s spine and hip bones, to which he attaches pickups and potentiometers.
Prince Midnight says he ruled out using Philip’s skull because it was damaged, but his first intention was to crown the neck of the guitar with that part of the skeleton.
In his Facebook account, the musician makes sure that the guitar is kept in tune, that all the pieces are flat and a steel bar supports the backbone of the skeleton.
The guitar “is completely stable,” he says, and said goodbye to his uncle, writing, “Uncle Filip RIP (Rock in Perdition).”
He admits that his mother was scandalized at first and told him that this is the sacrilege and the work of the devil. “You know how moms are,” she told Huffpost online.
But then she asked her mother if she considered her uncle, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1996 in Greece, the largest “heavy metal” in the world, to which she said yes.
“Where would you rather be then, buried or beaten?” He asked her, and she said, “Beating.”
