I was gonna tell you, you should look at Ibanez's, they generally have a really good selection of actually-halfway-decent guitars for pretty cheap. I'm a little surprised that they don't have anything in the 150-250 pounds range. It would be better to get a guitar new in that range, I would only buy a used guitar that was at one point a very expensive or nice guitar. Don't half-ass it and get some cheap guitar, do your homework and look around. There are a lot of really good guitars around the price range you're talking about. My guitar that I use for the band cost about 385 pounds new and is an extremely nice guitar, it just came with boring pickups.
I just reread your post, and...5K pounds for a guitar?? That's absolutely insane. That's over 7,000 us dollars, more than I've ever seen any guitar being advertised for. I believe you, that's just..wow.
Basically how we get paid for this gig is that we get to keep all the ticket sales after the first 10 tickets are sold. The bar gets pretty packed, so there might end being maybe 60-80 people there?? Not really sure. I did go through some kind of 'audition' but it wasn't really much...they had nobody else auditioning for the spot, so it was basically just to make sure that I don't completely suck. Which I definitely don't I've already written a new 'intro' for us (we start out every live show with a 2 minute or so instrumental) that I'm pretty excited about, and the newest song that we wrote features one of my riffs as the main riff