Paul McCartney’s iconic bass guitar going missing “felt like the worst moment of my life”, reveals former Wings sound engineer

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

More than 50 years later, it still hurts. "It felt like the worst moment of my life," says Ian Horne, remembering the morning in October 1972 when, aged 25, he realised he had just lost one of the most famous musical instruments of the 20th century. "I walked up to the truck, saw the padlock on the ground, and my heart sank."

Horne is a former sound engineer with Wings, the band Paul McCartney started with his wife Linda a year after the Beatles split up in 1970. Following a day in the recording studio with the band, Horne had parked a truck full of their musical equipment on a west London street. “It was a three-ton truck with a roller shutter at the back,” he recalls. “When I pushed the shutter up, I saw straightaway that it was gone. The bass wasn’t there.”

The instrument in question, a 1961 Höfner 500/1 violin bass, is at the centre of BBC Two’s delightful new Arena film McCartney: the Hunt for the Lost Bass. It’s a documentary about the Beatles, the thrill of being young in Hamburg, the sudden and immense success that followed, and how that success soured. It’s also a detective story that follows the missing instrument over half a century, travelling through London’s criminal demi-monde, the hippy drugs scene, rural Hertfordshire and, at one point, a visit to the seaside.

The story ends with the unlikely rediscovery of the bass in 2023 following several investigations and an online campaign that generated headlines around the world. But it begins with 18-year-old Paul McCartney in Hamburg in 1961, on the edge of everlasting fame. The Beatles had been working relentlessly for months, and McCartney needed a new bass. He bought a Höfner 500/1, made in Bavaria, for 287 Deutschmarks (£30) from Steinway Musikhaus in Hamburg.

Within two years, the instrument would be as recognisable as the band's mop-tops and collarless suits. This was the bass heard on the first run of hits, including Love Me Do, She Loves You and Twist and Shout. McCartney liked it so much he bought an updated version of the same model in 1963.

The original 1961 bass was relegated to being a back-up, but it was still with McCartney when he went into the studio with Wings in 1972. The Beatles’ split had been so acrimonious that he had sunk into depression – one that only lifted when Linda encouraged him to start writing songs again. Now, finally, he had a new project.

Following the studio session, Horne stopped to drop off fellow Wings crew member Trevor Jones at his flat in Notting Hill, west London. In one of those minor decisions that turn out to be major, he decided to stay at Jones’s flat on Lancaster Road rather than drive on to his own home on the outskirts of London. Horne parked on nearby Cambridge Gardens, once a grand street but by then, as the documentary makes clear, an area of squats and drug dealers where the urban poor and the counterculture squeezed up against each other. “All the big houses on Lancaster Road and Cambridge Gardens were squats then,” says Horne. “There were lots of nice people in the hippy culture, but there were some dodgy people about as well”.

Jones knew where the dodgy people lived on Cambridge Gardens. When he and Horne discovered the bass had been stolen, they grabbed tools from the truck and went looking for them. “We visited two or three houses in a sort of threatening manner – you know, not very polite,” Horne admits. “But we didn’t find it.”

Had they only known it, the two men were very close, but this was the point where the bass slipped out of Horne’s grasp. “I rang the police and went to the station to make a statement, but they were no help. There was nothing more to be done. I realised I had to go and tell Paul in person.”

Horne feared the worst as he approached McCartney’s house near Abbey Road. “All these things go through your head,” he says. “I must have looked like a beaten man when I knocked on the door. I just came out with it: ‘I’ve got some bad news, Paul. Our truck was broken into and the bass was stolen.’

I expected him to go ballistic, but Paul was lovely about it. He said, ‘It’s all right, I’ve got another one.’”

By which, of course, he meant the 1963 Höfner. But that one didn’t have quite the same emotional and historical resonance. It hadn’t been there in Hamburg and the Cavern Club in Liverpool. It wasn’t the bass that started it all.

So why was McCartney initially so relaxed about losing the 1961 Höfner, and why, much later, did he change his mind? Perhaps, in 1972, still affected by the break-up with John Lennon and looking for a new musical path, the instrument represented what McCartney was trying to leave behind.

In a sense, its departure confirmed that he was moving on creatively. But as we age, most of us begin to look back more tenderly on our youth. John Lennon died in 1980, Linda in 1998. McCartney later navigated a troubled marriage and divorce from Heather Mills in 2008. From 2009 he started to play more songs by the Beatles in his live sets – and if you’re playing the songs, you really do need the bass.

“I think anything that’s nicked, you want back, especially if it has sentimental value,” McCartney said of the bass recently. “It just went off into the universe and it left us thinking, ‘Where did it go?’ There must be an answer.”

Horne would stay with Wings for seven years, a key member of the team behind hits like Band on the Run and Live and Let Die. He went on to work with Ian Dury and Madness, but throughout it all there was the niggling memory of that fateful decision 50 years previously. “It was always in the back of my mind, wondering if it would turn up,” he says. “I felt like it had been stolen from me. And now it’s back.”

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McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass airs on Saturday 11 April at 8:45pm on BBC Two and iPlayer.

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