Being a Beatle did not provide Paul McCartney with any perks when in 1972 one of his basses, the Höfner 500/1, was stolen from a van transporting musical equipment. He had acquired it in 1961, when the band that would change rock history had had its decisive stage in Hamburg. In the city of sin in the sixties, McCartney got hold of that instrument whose peculiarity – with respect to the second Höfner that he has had in his life – is that it has the two pickups located together next to the neck.
Already in 1963 it became his spare bass, active until the dissolution of the band in 1969. But one cold and dark night in October 1972 he lost sight of it and after the theft he never found it again. Become an emblematic instrument in the history of rock, the Höfner house itself set out to start the search in 2018. It was in fact an employee, Nick Wass, who set out to find the legendary bass.
The investigation stalled but five years later, in May 2023, journalists Scott and Naomi Jones joined and launched The Lost Bass project as reinforcement. Half a century has passed since the loss of the instrument when, finally, a group of musical archaeologists has located it to the joy of the former Beatle himself.
“Following the release of last year’s Lost Bass project, Paul’s 1961 Höfner 500/1 bass, which was stolen in 1972, has been returned. The guitar has been authenticated by Höfner and Paul is incredibly grateful to everyone involved” , says the musician’s website.
More than 600 people contacted Lost Bass project researchers to offer help. “We received information about the facts: it had been stolen from the back of a 3-ton van during the night of October 10, 1972, in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London. This was the breakthrough we needed,” they indicate. the project website.
They then obtained information about what the thief did with the bass: he sold it to Ronald Guest, the owner of the Admiral Blake pub in Ladbroke Grove, London. “By examining old records, we established the entire family history from 1972 to the present. We suspected that the stolen bass had probably been in the same family since Ronal Guest purchased it.”
Britain has been on this issue since investigators published an article in The Sunday Telegraph on September 2, 2023, describing the search and who was part of the team. “We didn’t expect it to go very far, but it captured the imagination of thousands of people. Within a week it appeared in newspapers around the world.
Following the publicity, someone living in a terraced house in Hastings, on the south coast of England, contacted Paul McCartney’s company and then returned the bass to them.
McCartney used this bass in his performances in Hamburg and played it more than 250 times at The Cavern, the legendary club in Liverpool. It is the bass used in the recordings of The Beatles’ first two albums: Please Please Me and With The Beatles. Or at least in some of its themes. It is the bass heard in great hits like Love Me Do, Twist and Shout, All My Loving or She Loves You.
In the recent Disney documentary Get Back, Paul McCartney is seen in images from 1969 using this bass that would later be stolen in rehearsals for the legendary album. But curiously, when the Fab 4 go up to the roof of Apple together with Billy Preston to offer the brief concert that would end up being their last live appearance, McCartney chooses his other Höfner, the one he acquired in 1963 and which has separate pickups – one on the bridge and the other next to the neck -, which gives it a better sound. And that would be, perhaps, the truly emblematic one, since he still uses it today.
