2024-02-17 08:50:00
(CNN) — Paul McCartney’s legendary lost guitar has been reunited with its owner more than 50 years after it was stolen.
McCartney played the iconic Höfner bass during the recording of The Beatles’ first two albums, which included legendary hits like “Twist and Shout” and “Love Me Do,” and then used it as a backup bass during the rest of his time with the band.
He continued to play it after the Beatles broke up until it was stolen in 1972 from the back of a van in Notting Hill, London.
The guitar was missing until the Lost Bass Projectled by Höfner executive Nick Wass and investigative journalists Scott and Naomi Jones, investigated more than 100 leads and located her in Hastings, a town on the south coast of England.
“The pursuit of bass wasn’t just for Paul McCartney, it was for all the fans,” Wass told CNN on Friday. “It was so we could all see this (…) bass that unleashed Beatlemania.”
Their search was widely publicized, and those responsible detailed the guitar’s distinctive features, prompting the family who had it to “show up with pictures of the bass in their attic saying, ‘Is this this one?'” Scott Jones told CNN on Thursday.
McCartney is “incredibly grateful to everyone involved” in returning the bass to him and has verified that it is the same guitar he played so often in the ’60s, according to a statement on his website.
Wass first launched the Lost Bass Project in 2018 after a conversation with McCartney himself, he told CNN on Friday, but it wasn’t until Scott and Naomi Jones joined the search after seeing McCartney perform at Glastonbury that ” useful clues began to arrive.”
Following a media appeal, the breakthrough came in October 2023, when the team received a tip from two McCartney sound engineers who had parked the van in the Ladbroke Grove area of Notting Hill while The former Beatle was recording an album nearby with his new band, Wings.
This allowed them to discover precisely when and where the guitar had been stolen, disproving previous rumors that it had disappeared in 1969, just before the Beatles’ last rooftop concert.
The initially ignored track that allowed Paul McCartney’s bass to be recovered
The location also matched an email Wass had received earlier that year, which he had initially “ignored” because it “didn’t make much sense,” he said.
Wass added that he then asked for more information and the sender of the email told him that his father had stolen the bass and taken it to Ronald Guest, owner of the nearby Admiral Blake pub.
Meanwhile, Naomi Jones dug through the archives to verify those addresses and confirm that the story held up.
“Evidence along the road suggests the thief didn’t know what he was stealing that night,” Scott Jones said. “I think for him it was just a guitar and that he later discovered it was Paul McCartney’s guitar.”
The thief asked Guest to “effectively hide the guitar from him,” Jones continued, and the team turned their attention to the pub, “beginning to search through records of births, marriages and deaths” and tracking “where the low within the Guest family.
Although the guitar is slightly damaged and will need some repairs before it can be played again, professionals will be able to restore it, according to the Lost Bass Project.
“This guitar is invaluable,” Wass said. “In a sense it has no value except to Paul McCartney and to all the Beatles fans in the world… it’s priceless.”
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