Piano Tour

April 2007 - the brainchild of singer-songwriter George Michael and his partner Kenny Goss, who runs a Dallas art gallery, and featuring the piano bought in 1970 by John Lennon and put in his studio in Tittenhurst Park.

It was placed outside the Ford's Theatre in Washington where 142 years earlier Abraham Lincoln was shot as he watched a performance of Our American Cousin. Last week it was outside the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville during the execution of a death row prisoner, and before that it was in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, and at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on the anniversaries of the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King respectively.

Michael bought the piano six years ago for £1.5m - a record price at the time for pop memorabilia. Having bought in, as it were, to the history of the song, the couple felt it would be wrong to leave the piano languishing in their front room and the idea of taking it to places where extreme acts of violence had taken place or were taking place was born. "By taking the piano to all these sites, we are reminded that violence has long been a part of our history," Michael said.