A news story about a long-lost Höfner bass first appeared in the pages of Bass Guitar Magazine in December 2019, in which Höfner themselves explained: “In the spring of 1961, a young man walked into a music shop in Hamburg, Germany, and purchased his first bass guitar, a Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass.
“He would use this bass to record his band’s first two albums and several number-one hits at Abbey Road recording studios. A young man’s dream came true... He is, of course, Paul McCartney of the Beatles.
“The bass was relegated to backup duties in October 1963 and was last used by McCartney in 1969 during the Let It Be recordings. Then it vanished.
Article continues below“This is the most important missing guitar in the world. It’s the bass you hear on Please Please Me, She Loves You, Twist and Shout, and many other hits. As his first bass, it has enormous sentimental value to Paul McCartney.”
A search to find the bass was led by Höfner’s then Media and Marketing Manager, Nick Wass, who launched the #tracethebass campaign to locate and return the iconic instrument. A global appeal followed in 2023, backed by former BBC journalist Scott Jones and television producer Naomi Jones.
“I thought there was maybe a 5 per cent chance that we’d find it,” says Wass. “The bass had been missing for 50 years, with no sightings and no solid leads.
“I spoke to Keith Smith, Paul McCartney’s technical manager, and he thought it had been thrown in a skip years ago. So I wasn’t hopeful, but I kept going. I thought there was always a chance.
“There were all sorts of rumors floating around the music world – someone claimed that a former roadie for the Who, now living in Massachusetts, had taken it. John McVie from Fleetwood Mac was another name that was touted as having got hold of the bass, but there was nothing credible.”
“It just went off into the universe and it left us thinking, where did it go?” says McCartney in a new BBC documentary about the instrument – McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass. “But there must be an answer…”
The breakthrough finally came after a newspaper article was syndicated worldwide, leading to an unprecedented number of calls and emails with tips about the bass guitar’s possible whereabouts.
“Suddenly it was everywhere,” says Wass. “The L.A. Times, New York Times, Daily Indian Herald, – you name it. Then we heard from Ian Horne, a former roadie for Paul. He was there when the bass was stolen on 10th October 1972. That was huge – we finally knew exactly when it had been taken.
“I then remembered an earlier email from an ambulance worker called Steve Glenister, who’d heard a story about the bass ending up in a pub in Ladbroke Grove. At the time, I dismissed it – but when Ian also mentioned Ladbroke Grove and a specific street, Cambridge Gardens, the pieces started to fit.”
What happened next?
We dug deeper. My colleague Naomi checked the electoral register from 1972 and found that Steve Glenister’s parents had lived at 100 Cambridge Gardens, a big Georgian house that had been split into apartments. Hawkwind also lived there for a while, as did another band called the Pink Fairies.
I contacted Steve again and told him what we’d found. Eventually, he admitted that it was his dad who had stolen the bass and given it to the landlord of his favourite pub, the Admiral Blake in Ladbroke Grove.
Were you able to trace the landlord?
Yes. The landlord was a man called Ronald Guest. Ron had three children: Graham, Hayden, and Elaine. Graham, the oldest, was given the bass to play and used it until he went to university. The bass was then passed on to Hayden.
The family later moved to another pub in Wembley, and then to a pub in Wellingborough. At some point, the bass remained with their mum, Mary Guest, Ron’s wife. After Ron died, Hayden retrieved the bass from her.
Hayden eventually married Catherine Murphy, and they moved down to Hastings. It was Cathy who saw the news article about the missing bass. She went up into the attic and soon realized that she might just have Paul McCartney’s missing bass.
She only lived about eight miles from Paul McCartney’s house in Sussex, so she took some pictures over there. Paul wasn’t there – he was in L.A. rehearsing – but the people at the house contacted his technical manager, Keith Smith. Keith showed Paul some pictures the next morning, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’
In the end, Paul knew it was back before I did. I got a call one evening, about 8 o’clock. I was watching Netflix when the phone rang. It was Paul McCartney. That’s when I knew we’d found it.
When were you able to see the bass in person?
I drove from Bavaria to England to examine it. There was no doubt – it was the bass. But I had to produce a formal report for legal purposes.
Holding it was quite something. This was the instrument Paul had started with. After five years of searching, there it was in front of me.
What condition was it in?
Somebody had strung it right-handed and put big, thick strings on it – probably taken from a Precision bass or something. Those strings are no good for a short-scale Höfner. And, of course, the strings didn’t fit the nut either. It looked like someone had taken a hammer and chisel to widen the nut slots.
It had been strung up in the case like that for fifty years, which meant the neck had started to come out of the scarf joint. The bridge was also in awful shape and impossible to intonate.
None of the pickups worked, so we had to replace the bobbins with a vintage set. It’s all been put back together as close to the original as possible – except for the tuners, which weren’t original anyway. They had been replaced around May 1963 with a set of Waverley tuners.
Whoever had done that had bought a set of tuners intended for a six-a-side guitar, like a Fender Strat, whereas a Höfner has a two-a-side headstock. That meant two of the tuners on the Höfner were upside down.
Subsequently, I think it was on their last British tour in December ’65 or January ’66, one of those tuners broke and was replaced with one from George’s Gretsch.
So the Höfner ended up with three Waverley tuners and one from the Gretsch. They had all rusted, so we found a set of original ’61 tuners and put those on.
Has anyone put a value on the bass?
I spoke to one of the bigger papers early on, and I foolishly said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe $10 million.’ Every newspaper article since has been quoting that figure, but really it’s priceless. It’s like the Mona Lisa – it’ll never be for sale.
How would you sum up McCartney’s relationship with Höfner?
I feel like he was born with a Höfner bass. He was 18 or 19 when he bought that first one in Steinways Music in Hamburg, and it just became a part of him.
I know he didn’t play it with Wings, but it wasn’t a happy time when the Beatles split. He didn’t want to be a Beatle anymore, and holding the Höfner made him a Beatle. But he picked it up again in the late ’80s, and he hasn’t put it down since.
- McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass is in cinemas only on April 2 and 4.
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