Stolen Höfner bass, which belonged to Paul McCartney and was used to record The Beatles’ first two albums, was found and returned after 51 yearsafter the “The Lost Bass Project” campaign that was carried out in a search around the world.
Paul McCartney asked the Höfner brand to help him find the missing instrument that helped launch Beatlemania across the universeScott Jones, a journalist who teamed up with Höfner executive Nick Wass to track him down, said Friday.
The bass, dubbed “the most iconic lost musical instrument of all time” by the team responsible for the search, The Lost Bass Project, It was used in Beatles songs such as the 1963 hits She Loves You and All My Loving.
“It’s the bass that started Beatlemania,” Nick Wass, one of the founders of the search team, told Reuters. “That’s why he’s important, he’s the one who started it.” A public call for the project last year went around the world.
Paul McCartney’s bass was used on Beatles singles such as the 1963 hits. The instrument was stolen in 1972 from the van of the group Wings, which McCartney created after the breakup with The Beatles, in the Nothing Hill area of London. The thief then took it to the pub in his area, but he realized that it would be difficult to sell it right away so he asked the owner of the establishment to keep it for him.
“As a result of the publicity, someone living in a house in Hastings on the south coast of England contacted Paul McCartney’s company and returned the bass to them,” The Lost Bass Project said. The instrument was returned in 2023, but the news was announced on Thursday, February 15, 2024. The bass has remained in the pub owner’s family for 51 years. A young man named Ruaidhri Guest shared on X: I inherited this instrument which has been returned to Paul McCartney.
“The guitar has been authenticated by Höfner and Paul is incredibly grateful to everyone involved,” a spokesperson reported on McCartney’s website. Wass told Reuters that the bass was “somewhat damaged,” with a crack in the neck, a damaged bridge that would need to be replaced and pickups that no longer worked. “But they can be fixed, the neck can be repaired and we can make it playable again,” Wass said.
History of Paul McCartney’s bass
Paul McCartney bought the bass in 1961, long before he rose to fame, when The Beatles already existed and were touring small clubs in Germany. This model has historically been linked to McCartney, who acknowledged on numerous occasions that he fell in love with the instrument for its peculiar symmetrical design, similar to a violin.
Paul paid £30 63 years ago for the bass, although it would cost around £800 today (more than 17 thousand Mexican pesos). According to The Guardian newspaper, the instrument could reach 10 million pounds at auction (more than 214 million Mexican pesos).
In 2015, a guitar stolen from the late John Lennon in the 1960s sold for $2.41 million at an auction in Beverly Hills, California. in United States. The person who had it said that she bought it without knowing her connection to Lennon.
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