Original subtitles

Hey guys. How's it going?

Okay.

Right.

The Lost Bass, yay!

It's a story. It is a story. It's quite a thing, yeah.

And this being my first bass that I got in Hamburg all

those years ago, I had an attachment to it, you know.

It just went off.

Into the universe, you know, it's like where did it go? There must be an

answer, you know Somebody's got it

you

And as you see, if you think what's being written in the yarn on Thursday...

This was one of the main places we used to sit and write songs.

The sneak bunk off school, come in here, eat some fried eggs. There's a thing

about fried eggs, I don't know why, everywhere.

You go to Hunter Davison's story, they're all eating fried eggs. They must

have been just after the war, they must have just loved fried eggs. This is

where we used to live.

Our humble abode in Forthland Road.

Allerton, Liverpool, and this is where we used to live as a little family.

And there's some people out there, what are they doing there?

That's why we left.

Lots of lovely memories.

Not enough of my mum and the smells that would have come from the kitchen when

she did Sunday dinners.

She'd do off cuts of lamb or beef and sneak them in to us, her little

boys. Shh, don't tell your dad.

Shh.

You see, whenever I talk about my mum, it's always dangerous because this is

where she went from.

This is our kids' little room.

Yeah, I stopped them going in there.

for many years because it was too important for

me. I'm a brother.

I was 12, my brother was 14, and she died of cancer

when you're 12 or 14.

You don't understand.

You have to get on with life.

you have to survive and because dad had been in his own band

at the back of his mind he always thought well that was a way out

and so he bought me a banjo and my brother a guitar spanish guitar

i took that out the back window our kid was sitting in the

back garden lost just

miles away with his guitar.

My brother was 14 in that photograph.

Beatlemania came six years later.

If I'm in a not very good mood, a great thing to do is just take a guitar,

because you think about it, you sort of hold it to you, you know, a guitar, and

it's kind of a comforting thing to do.

You go off into a little room somewhere, you know, on your own, and tell the

guitar your troubles, kind of thing. It's like a cheap psychiatrist, really.

And it turns round, and the guitar sort of sends it back to you, and it comes

back as a song somehow.

Well...

It started in Hamburg.

You had gangsters, pimps, you had prostitutes, you had

all you could imagine.

Hamburg is echoing to the invasion from the latest big groups in Britain who've

taken over.

I heard the music through a window, a cellar window.

I just wanted to see that rock and roll music.

The next band came on, and that was The Beatles.

Paul came up, and I think he was the one who talked to the audience first,

because he could speak German.

Hello, The Beatles.

Guten Tag, sir.

It was really sweet.

We were young kids.

George was 17, you know.

And I was a little older then, you know.

We became friends, and they came to the house. They got great food.

Put them in the bathtub.

Because they didn't have any mother or father to look after them.

It was a friendship. A friendship grew up, you know.

He is still that same little Paul he was when he was 19 years old, you know.

It's the same guy.

I'm a graphic designer.

I had the job to do the cover on Revolver and a bass player.

But now I can't play any guitar chords with this cramp.

And I can't do a fist.

I can't do a fist, you know. It doesn't work.

Luckily enough, I can still hold my pencil.

I'm going to do drawings of the story of the base.

I decided to start with the top ten. That's the first time I actually saw the

base.

So what do you want to talk about? We want to talk about you as a bass player,

really.

So you've got Paul's guitar, and next to it, Stuart Sutcliffe's guitar.

My bass guitar days go back to when Stuart was the bass player.

Stuart had fallen in love with this girl called Astrid.

Stu decided he was going to stay in Hamburg, and so that meant we didn't

have a bass player.

And John and George thought, I'm not doing it.

So that left me.

Eventually, then, I found a nice little shop in the center of Hamburg.

And I saw this bass in the window with the violin-shaped bass, the Hoffman.

I don't think it was very expensive. It was something like about 30 quid.

Then once I got my own bass, then I was a bass player.

I remember it was the last day the band played in the Top Ten Club.

And Stuart, it was his last night of playing.

And we were sitting outside.

The sun was shining.

I think it was Sunday morning.

And we were all sitting there, being all pretty stoned. Stoned meaning, you

didn't have pills and stuff.

Talking, talking, talking.

John was sitting next to me, and I said, well, Stuart isn't playing. I could play

the bass.

And he said, oh, sorry, Klaus, Paul already bought the bass. He's going to

be the next bass player.

Could be in your moment, Klaus. You could have become Beatle No. 5.

Yeah, all right.

I don't know. Anyway, I don't even want to think about it.

I lived in Hamburg through my brother's letters.

Then suddenly he came back one day and he had that Hofner.

It's so unique.

We were the roadies.

I probably held that bloody thing.

And then our kid got a Ford Classic.

Look cool And

their music then, you know going to the cabin

The difference was unbelievable it was like

whoo Wow what happened?

We knew we were going somewhere we always felt that we had something

They did with John Lennon, you know, he's a very witty cat.

With me, who could hold his own.

With George, who was like spectacular.

And then finish it all up with Ringo.

So we had a kind of magic.

I'm the least technical person you'll meet.

So I don't know what I do.

I just play with it.

It's a lovely instrument to play and it's kind of easy to play.

And so I got very used to it and loved it.

This Hofner bass really suited Paul's style of play. It's very rhythmical, but

at the same time it's very, very melodic.

You can hear lots of songs, that the songs are very, very simple. And the

bass does more movement than any other instrument.

I'm a big fan of James Jamieson, who was the

Motown bass player, because normally bass is...

But he was going... I was going, wow, that's a great way to use the bass.

That set me free. I was like, great, okay, I can make up melodies.

So as the guys were doing the main song, I would just try and put something

imaginative behind it.

It was a great feeling. I mean, I still remember it, the moment.

Bingo.

First time I was aware of the Beatles, I'd have been about nine years old.

My clear memory of that is seeing them on the six o'clock television news.

And all the girls were screaming outside the cinemas and that kind of thing.

They were playing electric guitars.

And let's face it, you know, electric guitars are so sexy.

My mother would have thought it not the right thing to have an electric guitar.

That was for bad boys, you know.

Years later, I was the electric guitar manager with Hofner, a small German

guitar company.

Subsequently, I'd met Paul McCartney. It was at his studio down south in England.

He just walked in and said, oh, hello, you're Mr Hofner. Do you know where my

old Hofner's gone?

And I knew what he meant, straight away, my old Hofner. He meant the 61 bass.

We'd been looking for my old bass for years.

But that's what happened with Nick. I started talking about it and just

saying, yeah, we're looking for it. I don't know if we'll ever find it.

Of course, I had to say, you know, I've got no idea where it's gone.

It's all a bit of a mystery.

It's the most important bass of any bass ever, anywhere.

In terms of anybody actually totally associated with an instrument, yeah,

McCartney and the Hofner bass.

There's just something in the soul of the two of them.

Here's the old Hofner factory down in Bavaria.

Well, it's still standing.

Poor old place.

And it was here.

in these premises that they built the base all those years ago.

That moment, that turn in history, you almost had to be there,

really, to feel the electricity in the air.

I was probably bored on a wet Wednesday when I designed and put up the web page

on the Hofner website.

The usual sort of things, if you've got any information, email us. And I think

Cathy came up with the name Trace the Base with the hashtag on the front.

Yes. I think it was you, was it? It was me, yes. Well, there you are. Genius.

Very catchy.

It's good.

Genius, you see.

Trace the Base.

The whole of our marriage, you know, for the last 20-odd years.

Kathy's just supported me with one lunatic scheme after another, you know,

and she used to be a bank manager. She's good at filing stuff.

We talked about it endlessly. Endlessly, yeah.

I don't think there was one purpose in searching for the base.

There was 100 million fans out there who I knew would be thrilled to bits to know

that this thing had come back.

So it was for everybody.

Not just ball.

I was in Liverpool, so I could go every game that I could afford to go to.

27,000 people used to be on the court.

And very emotional sound.

Among the many things I memorized before I picked up an instrument were the

harmony parts.

I can't sing in Paul's register now, but I could then when I was a kid.

And we would cut out cardboard likenesses of the guitars we liked and

draw the controls on them and then mime along with records.

It was a perfect apprenticeship for being on top of the pops, you know,

pretending to play.

The hardest thing was to make a Hofner bass, because you needed a longer piece

of cardboard for the neck.

This is like when I'm nine or something, you know.

Well, the thing about the Hofner is it's very

lightweight.

which is great.

It makes it easier to play.

So that was the one on all the early Beatles records.

So it was a very rich period for music, for us, and particularly for making

records.

That bass was used an enormous amount, and it started to fall to

bass.

And we don't know when, again, because all the records are long gone.

They ordered another Hofner bass.

We think it gets delivered into his hand on October the 4th, 1963.

They did a gig on an old TV program called Ready Steady Go.

And there's pictures of him at rehearsal and pictures of him actually doing the

performance to camera.

And both bases are there.

He's got the 61 from Hamburg.

It has two pickups close together.

And he's got this new one.

They've moved this pickup down to near the bridge.

And in some of the shots, he's got the new one and he's holding out, but it

hasn't even got a strap on it.

So we're kind of concluding that it arrived that very day.

And the 61 gets put on backup duties, poor thing.

Within a couple of months of that, the February, they're playing in front of 70

million people in the USA.

Meanwhile, the 61 base was away being repaired.

Our roadie, Mal, took it off and brought it back like

new, but with a completely different paint job on it.

When it returned, it had been completely re-sprayed.

And it came back with what's now called a three-part sunburst, which is more or

less black, red, yellow.

It's very distinctive when you look at this bass now.

For me, the whole charm of that instrument was gone.

I don't know how Paul feels about it.

I think he was a bit pissed off too.

Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head.

Found my way downstairs and drank a cock. And looking up, I noticed I was

late.

Found my coat and grabbed my hat.

Made the bus in seconds flat.

Found my way upstairs and had a smoke.

And somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

From my point of view, I think the 63 is nicer, maybe even better.

Better pickups, better sound, louder, whatever.

He's very singular. He played that 63 bass then continuously, and you never

see him playing the 61.

You know, he didn't swap and change between the two or anything.

They went back to America in 1965.

The 61 is being used as a backup, but not played.

If you look really careful, you see Ringo up on the jump riser, and just

down below Ringo on the back of the amp, there's the bass.

You have to look very eagle-eyed that it's there.

What happened to it after that is a mystery.

It's just luck and a lot of sort of peering at grainy old black and white

pictures.

The only time you see it again, you have to wait till a quick shot of it by the

coffee table and the Let It Be sessions, and then we don't see it anymore.

It's just not around.

Get back.

Get back.

Get back to where you want.

Get back.

The event is so momentous that historians may one day view it as a

landmark in the decline of the British Empire.

The Beatles are breaking up.

And when they split up, I mean, all the rancor starts, you know, the lawyers are

in, and it was chaotic.

There were guitars here, there were guitars there, and nobody was really

taking care of stuff.

This is the remarkable thing, is from the end of the Beatles, nobody had ever

seen this bass.

It just wasn't there anymore.

I was never able to establish any firm basis.

as to when it disappeared.

I put my hand up absolutely and say, I started this from nowhere, not knowing

how to do it. So I was kind of a bit handicapped, I suppose, and as green as

a cabbage as well.

It got to the point where it needed somebody better than me to start poking

about.

It was June 2022, and I was watching Paul McCartney headline at Glastonbury.

But there was one moment in the show where the stage just went black, apart

from one light just picking out Paul's Hofner bass.

And it just caught the varnish and the wood and everything. It was almost like

shining like gold for this split second. And I thought, is that the original

Hofner bass?

And... So I Googled it and saw that it wasn't.

The original bass that he'd got in 1961 was lost.

And I instantly started Googling to see and find out more about that story.

But in terms of an investigation and then thinking, I want to find this

thing, I thought, well, if no one else is doing that, and that guitar is so

important, we need to do it.

Me and my wife, we worked together.

And we convinced ourselves that we may not find the base, but we'd find stories

about the base. We'd find what the base meant to people.

You know, that sort of Beatlemania fan thing.

By July 2023, I'd seen that Hofner over in Bavaria

had ran a search.

And I was really curious to find out what they know.

So I wrote this very polite email, sort of introduced myself, thinking he was

German and being conscious of the English language that I was using.

And then within 24 hours, I realised that Nick was from London and he was on

the end of the phone and we were talking like old mates.

And I thought, oh, my God, these are exactly the people I've been looking for

for a long time.

We got together and I said to Scott, well, look, I've got a lot of emails and

I passed him the lot over for him to read and get a sense of what we were

dealing with there.

All of these leads that came in, you knew it was people that had lived with

this story for a long, long time.

It's just that it was wrong.

A man claiming he had one of Paul's guitars walked into a pawn shop in Las

Vegas. Called the gold and silver pawn shop to sell it as a television program

called the porn stars where it was aired Hope it helps.

I Definitely saw the base in an auction of music equipment in the mid 80s in

London It sold for 100 pounds to a music rental studio company I've heard that

the base is in Japan in the possession of a Japanese banker This information

was given me to a guy that knows the Beatles and the Beatles gear website.

Well, I had this vision

I used to say to people, I know what's happened.

Some German guy, rich German guy, has nicked it, and he's got a big castle in

the Bavarian mountains, and he invites you up, and then after a few drinks, he

says, come, I'll show you something special.

And there, over the mantelpiece, is hanging my base.

So it's a treasure hunt, but also people love the Beatles.

and loved Paul McCartney and wanted to help.

I've always admired Paul McCartney as a bass player.

He made the bass guitar cool.

Beatle fans know that the bass has disappeared and no one knows where it's

gone, so it'd be amazing if somebody ever did find it, because that's

history, isn't it?

It's history.

Ever since I can remember being a Beatles fan, it's only ever been one

band for me, I think.

First time I ever opened the size of peppers and that you opened it up and

they've all got mustaches And I thought when I get older on whatever mustache I

Bought it secondhand and he paid 80 pound for it, which is not much more

than poor paper is probably a Little bit day-tripper, but

I've

always wanted to play guitar.

I've tried for years

And I thought it might be easier to play bass because there's only four strings.

And it's a Vox.

Vox. You have to have a Vox, don't you, if you have a Beatles bass.

I don't know.

After all that, mate, it's broken.

Cut.

What's that?

Got there in the end. Yeah, practice makes perfect, doesn't it?

I work for the ambulance service.

I've been doing it 23 years now.

So I'm on the patient transport side, so it's all non-emergency.

There's a guy, Steve, I work with. He's a lovely guy.

I've known him for two, three years. We always have a good laugh when we crewed

up together.

You know, we bounce off each other quite nicely.

I'm always looking online for guitars and things, and I think I just might

have been by accident, went onto the Hofner website, saw that Nick Waz was

looking for it.

And that was like, yeah, the holy grail for me is, you know, it's like finding

the Bible, trying to find Paul McCartney's bass. You know, if you're a

fan, that's like... Wow.

Well, I was with Steve one day.

I said, well, I've still got a bass that's a bit like Paul McCartney's, and

he just sort of said, I think I know where that is, you know.

And I said, you're joking, aren't you?

So I just said to him, I said, I've got an idea where that might be, you know.

And he sort of looked at me and I went...

Right. I'm going to tell you something.

I don't know if it's right or proper, but I'm going to tell you something.

It's only a story I've heard.

He said, where? So I said, we don't know where. I said, but I think it was nicked

from a house in London.

So I said to Steve, can I tell the story? Can I tell Nick what little bit

you've told me?

I said, don't put my name on it.

No, he said, what we'll do... He said, I'll email it in and say it's a story

that someone told us on the back of the ambulance.

A patient.

I mean, the emails were quite mixed, if I'm honest.

One of them in particular was from these two guys who are a crew on an ambulance,

and they tell me this bullshit story about having a client in the back of the

ambulance, as they described it. A patient?

Yeah, but I think they call it client now, don't they?

who'd given them some story about the fact that the base had been stolen

and that it had been given to a guy in a pub

up at Labyrinth Grove, London.

And I thought, yeah, a bit more bullshit.

But I wrote a polite reply, that sounds like a really good book, Tales from the

Back of an Ambulance.

And I left it there.

I had a call from the news editor at The Telegraph looking for stories.

And I said, well, look, we're looking for Paul McCartney's lost bass.

And the minute I said it, Ben commissioned the story on the spot.

The story in The Telegraph went live on the 2nd of September. It was a Saturday.

It was around about 4 o'clock online.

Within minutes, the BBC were in touch.

So they wanted us on BBC Breakfast.

Well, delighted to say we're joined now by Nick Woss, who is a Hofner and lost

bass expert, and he's provided Paul McCartney with many of his iconic

instruments. Lots of interviews and radio station interviews, day and night.

I realised why being famous must be absolutely awful.

The difference with the lost bass is Paul McCartney had it refinished in

1964.

And the two pickups are now mounted in a big black piece of wood here. But I

think you've shown your audience some pictures of what we're after. Yeah.

This is it. Yeah. And the thing is, so it is distinctive and it should be

identifiable.

But of course, it may have been destroyed somewhere along the line. It

could have been taken by someone at the Apple offices.

We just don't know, do we?

No, we don't know. This is the problem.

In the

first 24

hours we must have had more than a dozen major

newspapers and radio and tv stations on nbc in america or in the new york times

and in germany and just went on and on and then tv channels

that we've never ever heard of we're getting in touch from brazil and other

places we thought that we'd almost plugged into that

spirit of the beatles you know we thought that we had

connected with that positive vibe around peace and love and the band and what the

music meant to people.

We got 600 emails in the first 48 hours and the emails were just landing and

landing and landing.

That's when the journalists in us took over and we started to pick out what

could be really important.

When we read Ian Horne's email, we knew instantly that we had to speak

to Ian.

And Ian's lead was the only lead that said, I know Paul McCartney.

And it was the only lead that said, I worked for Paul McCartney.

After he broke up with the Beatles, we met up.

I think Paul was definitely getting back in the saddle, I'd call it.

Which is a big step, because I think he hid away for a while.

Yeah, you know, it was very depressing, you know, because you were breaking from

your lifelong friends.

You weren't going to see them again.

It was depressing.

And not knowing whether I was going to continue in music.

Suddenly I wasn't having a good time. It wasn't working.

It was Linda who sort of said, you know, you've got to get it together and we've

got to do something.

So we ended up performing Wings.

I knew that if I kept playing Beatles songs, which I knew people

wanted, then I would become a Beatles tribute band.

And I thought, maybe that's not the greatest look.

He was... experimenting with things he hadn't done before. And a Yamaha bass, a

Fender bass, so he went through all the basses he saw people playing, you know.

We went on the road.

Boy, do we go on the road. Tell us about it. I mean... Well, because the thing

is, you know, normally you go on the road, at least you book hotels.

You know, anyone books hotels.

But we decided to really just bust the whole thing.

So we had a tranny and we just headed off up the motorway.

We had the kids, a couple of dogs, the whole group, all our instruments. There

was a U-Haul following behind with the... The roadies. The roadies.

And we literally turned up at universities and stuff. We turned up at

Nottingham University was the first one.

And we said... In fact, we didn't. I didn't say anything. I stayed in the

van. One of the lads, Ian Horne, actually went in. Well, you know, I've

got Paul McCartney out in the van. Do you want him on lunchtime tomorrow?

Really? I need to come out in the van to sort of check.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we'll have him.

he was loving it being back in the saddle he never played the uh hofner as

far as i know it was around so lugging it around from place to

place yeah maybe that's more me than him meaning if you

ask for it i've got it

We'd just finished the university tour, and we were recording an album called

Red Rose Speedway.

Well, on this particular day, we'd been in the studio, and we didn't leave till

quite late, so we drove back to Trevor's.

Yeah, Trevor's my brother-in-law.

He was my assistant.

We had a truck full of gear, which we had the Hoffnett bass, acoustic guitars.

Some amplifiers.

I couldn't park at Trevor's because obviously Trevor's house was a school,

so it was restricted parking.

Just went up the road a bit to the right and there's a tea junction there, which

is Cambridge Gardens.

There's a parking place right on the edge, so I thought I'd put it there with

the back of the truck visible to everybody.

Basically, I had a big heavy-duty padlock on the back. It was a roller

shutter on the back.

So I felt fairly secure.

I walked back to Trevor's and we went to sleep.

And then, of course, in the morning, the nightmare began.

You could see that the padlock was off.

And I went, oh, God.

It was cold sweat.

So I throw the roller door up and immediately notice there's stuff

missing, you know.

So there's a couple of amplifiers, two guitars, including the Hofner bass.

I was beside myself with worry and anger and pain.

Right opposite where the truck is, so the back of the truck's there is 100

Cambridge Gardens.

At the time, it seemed kosher.

But all these hippies and people that lived around Lancaster Road and

Cambridge Gardens and these squat houses.

There were a lot of musicians.

There were obviously thieves amongst them.

Trevor thought this guy Dick Mick was a bit iffy.

Why? I don't know why, really. He flagged him up. I didn't flag anyone.

I did feel it was one of that mob because they all knew we worked for

Paul.

And so, yeah, we sort of got tooled up in case it got nasty.

So, wait, hang on. In case what got nasty?

I decided we'd go and check this guy out so we could end the thing there.

So we went in there, kind of threatening the baby.

Dick Mick is still in bed. He was shitting himself.

We looked round, no stuff.

And eventually, you know, we had to go to Paul and tell him the news.

Knock on the door, and he comes to the door, and the truck's been broken into,

and the Hoffner base has been stolen, and a few other things.

And I sort of took a deep breath, stood there thinking, well, what's going to

come back at me?

And he was absolutely amazing. He just turned around, he says, all right, Ian,

I've got another one.

Had a feeling in me, did he think I've done it?

So I rang the police.

And the police didn't seem that bothered.

I think all the papers used to have contacts in the police, their friends on

the news desk, maybe they'd get a small payment, that's the way it used to work.

So in this particular case, the Standard had got a tip-off that this had

happened, but they didn't know very much about it, or even if it was true.

Obviously, the best person to confirm whether a guitar abyss had been stolen

would be him.

I set off for his house, and I didn't feel very comfortable about doing this.

I didn't think that this was the kind of journalism I really wanted to do.

And I thought that if he did come out, he's going to tell us to fuck off.

Probably an hour passed, standing around on the road, chatting to the

photographer.

Suddenly, without any warning, a wooden gate swung open and there was Paul.

I can clearly remember his first words were, ''What do you want, boys?''

And the first question I think I asked him, first of all, to confirm that the

guitar had been taken, and he said it had, so that confirmed the story and he

confirmed that it was the original one that he'd bought back in Hamburg.

which I knew about because I'd followed the Beatles.

So then I suddenly realised that I was actually in the middle of a very big

story. The most famous or iconic instrument of that era had been

stolen and I was talking to the guy who owned it.

And he was quite happy to chat about it. He posed for pictures for the

photographer.

And I think we probably spoke for maybe four or five minutes.

And at that stage, our presence had started to get noticed. A small crowd of

people had started to gather.

So he politely thanked us and closed the gate and went back into the house.

This was the first time I had met a Beatle.

The Beatles' music has enriched my life enormously.

And I just kind of felt... maybe this sounds a little bit sycophantic but i

just really felt that i would like to have said can i just thank you for

everything you've done i think your music's great um it's something which

will stay with me forever just something like that just to thank you i think that

would have been nice but i was in a rush and i never got to do that

paul

had

given a quote to a newspaper at the time and so we thought that you would

remember that or you'd remember you know it's his favorite base that had been

stolen nick was scratching his head as to why he hadn't been told that that

information hadn't been passed on i i have to presume that he'd forgotten i

mean this is a guy who's actually done quite a lot isn't it you know he's been

a few places and around so

He might well have just not registered with him. I don't know. There has been a

report recently that you have said that you might get back with the Beatles.

Is this true?

No, I wouldn't think so. I don't think any of us fancy telling the truth.

Perhaps the bass wasn't as important to Paul in 1972 as it was to him when he

asked Nick to start the search.

I think, in a way, the Beatles have done it, you know?

Beatles started from nothing and got everywhere.

The thing is, you know, I don't know whether anyone really would even like to

even try and push it any further, you know?

The Hoffner was a Beatle bass, and he wasn't a Beatle anymore.

I don't blame him, you know.

Those guys had had a hell of a life.

For all their fame and their money, they'd had a hell of a time.

I think the Hofner was part of that time.

And they just wanted it gone.

Ian thought that the base had gone into 100 Cambridge Gardens.

So we were interested to find out more about this character, Dick Mick, that at

that time certainly Trevor suspected and Ian did as well.

Dick Mick was a roadie, and he'd been a weed dealer.

We were able to find that in the basement flat of 100 Cambridge Gardens,

a band called Hawkwinds, and a lot of members of the band called the Pink

Fairies lived.

Trevor and Ian, they were both very good friends of mine.

There was the next day when I saw Trevor and he just said, fuck, he says Paul's

bass got stolen out of the van last night outside Cambridge Garden. I said,

what?

They said, keep your ears peeled and, you know, see if there's any word coming

out or any word on the street or... I think, Mick, who was it?

Dick Mick was one of the people in the original Hawkwind.

Dick Mick was unfortunately most of the time out of his head on mandrax. But he

could have been outside blagging away or leaning against the van or whatever,

having a smoke.

You know, somebody could have said, oh, whose van's that? Oh, it's Wing's van,

you know.

I heard reports of Hawkwing's gear going missing.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. The whole dynamic around Hawkwind is,

you know, somewhat troubled.

In May 1972, Hawkwind had had £10,000 worth of kit

stolen from their van.

In old newspaper searches, we found out that they'd been banned from the BBC.

because they'd stolen a microphone.

I think, didn't they write a song that was sort of anti the Beatles? They were

anti the Beatles. They were anti the Beatles, so they felt quite anarchic.

It felt like Hawkwind had a motive, and it also felt like they had the

personality to go and do it.

Ladbroke Grove was pretty funky.

You know, there was the hippies, there was the...

all the people who had the fruit and vegetables a lot of thugs showed up on

portobello road and that's when things started to go downhill you know rougher

and people started injecting people started getting stuff stolen

paul

rudolph described a place with a lot of poverty a lot of people really clinging

on that it wasn't a big deal for something to be stolen out of the back

of a van. It happened all the time.

The base did feel like that's the last place on Earth it should really be.

Which is a long, long way from these dark, poorly lit streets.

You know, lots of political banners written on bed sheets sort of hanging

out the windows.

Anarchists and theft.

To picture the bass in the middle of all of that makes you feel like this little

thing is out there that desperately needs saving.

But then a penny dropped.

I thought, ah, I got an email about six months before this from a guy

talking about the base being stolen in Labrador Grove.

So I naturally went and dug back through the pile of emails and found it. It was

from a guy called Andrew, Andrew Dickinson.

And so, yeah, I contacted them and said, look, you know, something's occurred.

We didn't tell them what.

Further information's arisen.

Can they tell me more?

I didn't think we were going to hear any more, to be honest.

You know, it was a very small story to tell.

Whereabouts are you struggling?

Oh, just my neck.

He's, like, really digging in hard, you know? Yeah.

I think he was using his elbow or something.

I think they do a lot with their elbow. Yeah.

Dig in, you know.

Did you get a happy ending?

No, no, I didn't fancy it.

I got back to Steve and said, this Nick, he's emailed me again.

Next time.

I think, you know, sure story to tell. Do you want to get involved and say a

little bit more?

Oh, God.

Straight away I thought, I've opened my mouth here and he's not going to let

this go now.

What I didn't want to come out was...

Our first house was just off of Ladbroke Grove, not far from Grenfell Tower.

It was quite a carousel of people coming and going, really.

I think I was made aware of who you could talk to and where you could go.

You had boundaries of where you could go and where you couldn't go.

So there was only so many people you were likely to get to meet or likely to

get to see.

Dad had a couple of jobs.

He played a lot of football, Saturdays and Sunday mornings.

Dad's mates, they would always tell me how good my dad was as a semi-pro

footballer. Because he was good, Dad.

There was a pub.

It's called the Admiral Blake.

And that's where they all used to congregate, my dad and his mates.

So occasionally I'd get taken across.

It was a good source of information, it was a good source of recreation.

It was just a good way of socialising and getting around and getting to know

what was going on and doing what around the area and stuff like that.

There was racketeering going on and people going round and if you want a

garden fork or a spade, there's a couple in the back of that lorry that no one

knows are there if you want that.

If you couldn't get rid of it or you hadn't sold it, take it out of the pub,

someone will have it off you.

Someone will buy it off you.

Because obviously I wasn't always crewed up with him, so I was getting little

bits of information here, there, everywhere, you know.

So he got to a stage where when I was looking at the roadside, I thought, oh,

I'm working with him again, I know what's coming here.

I'm just going to have to try and muddy the waters a little bit here because

he's not going to let it go.

He'd heard that it had been stolen.

from the road that they were in.

They sold it to the barman in the pub and then they sort of dumped it in the

canal just because they knew it was Paul McCartney's and they'd never be able to

get rid of it.

We got an A to Z out of the van.

I said, that was the pub, so there's the canal there, so I'm assuming there. So

he said, so whereabouts do you think? I said, I don't know, I wasn't there, so I

had no idea.

I said, but that's the canal. I said, if I lived in that pub, I would have walked

over that bridge.

and just lobbed it there.

And then he said, do you reckon we could get a boat and go and find it? I said,

no. No, I said, I don't think we can go and get a boat and go and find it.

I think Andrew replied to me, saying he would ask his partner,

and then I get an email from Steve.

Now we had a strong lead, it's been stolen, and it went on to this pub.

The email had said that it had been thrown into the canal.

That was quite a low point, really.

It was almost like, you know, the body of the guitar had been dumped into the

water there.

And I remember feeling that the result isn't what we wanted, but we might

actually have a story now that we know where Paul McCartney's base is, but

sadly it's at the bottom of that canal and probably gone forever.

My manager at the time got a call from Paul's manager at the time.

Richard wants you to go down to work with Paul. I said, kid, no. He was like,

you know, I was 33, I think, when we started doing that.

He wasn't calling up an eight-year-old kid who was in the fan club.

One, two, three, four.

We got off to a flying start, you know.

And we'd just recorded with two guitars and vocals, and it was good fun.

There's a version of me singing My Brave Face where I'm singing lead, so Paul

could fly around on the bass, and he's doing all these moves, but I never felt

like he could hear the voice.

Because this bass was just too... it was too big sounding.

At some point I asked whether the whereabouts of the Hofner, and it

suddenly appeared.

Elvis Costello said, what about your Hofner bass, you know, your violin bass,

the Beatle bass?

And I was saying, well, I can try it, but it's not very good at keeping in

tune.

Which it isn't, because they're not very expensive instruments.

So I had given up recording with it really in favor of more some modern

instruments But he said I love the sound of it, you know go on But it wasn't the

lost bass the 61 bass this was 63 But I think at that

point he that things change for Paul

And it recorded great. It's got a lovely tone for a little bass.

Honestly, I felt vindicated when I heard the part. You could hear his personality

really clearly.

And it had the tone. It had the tone. It was like somebody singing, you know?

Elvis Costello suggested bringing that.

the 63, maybe that kind of like, you might have thought, yeah, what happened?

Maybe that's when the whole conversation sort of started up again about where is

the original one?

By the time we got 89, 90, when we were about to embark on a big, massive world

tour, and Paul said, what are people going to want to, you know, they're

going to come to a gig, what are they going to want?

They're going to want pieces.

They're going to want some...

Big big moment

Paul's quite nostalgic about things.

They're important to him, not maybe in a collectible way, but just emotionally,

and they're part of his history and they're part of his life, and he, yeah,

he probably missed the bass.

He just wanted it back.

Yeah, well, I think anything that's nicked, you want back, you know,

especially if it has a sentimental attachment.

Plus, I was annoyed that someone nicked it.

You know, it's just like, how dare you? Give me it back, you know.

Very often in investigations, there's a breakthrough moment where you're

effectively given something on a plate.

Who's Stephen?

Who's this person? And how does he know so much about the theft of this guitar?

I made an inquiry about...

the residents of 100 Cambridge Gardens, so who was on the electoral register.

And I just remember reading through the list of names, and we got to the name

Glenister.

Oh, my God.

His parents are on the electoral register in 100 Cambridge Gardens.

We was on holiday in Spain, and my phone went.

Is that Steve Clements? Yeah.

It's Nick Bass here from The Lost Base.

I said, oh, right, hi, you all right?

He said, I think you know a little bit more than you're letting on.

Are you prepared to say anything? I said, not really. I don't know anything

other than I told you. And he said, well, I think you do.

I knew I had to ask him the question.

and say to him, look, Steve, just tell me what happened.

You know, I know you know, because you wouldn't have sent me all this stuff.

And I know you were in the house.

Just tell me what happened.

My dad used to come and watch me play football a lot.

He was never complimentary about the way I played. There was always something I

could have done better than that. So he was coming home one day and I had the

radio on in the car.

How old do you think you were at this point?

I may have just had the kids, so mid-20s, something like that.

This song come on.

And I just said, oh, it's the Beatles.

I like these.

And I'd done it more if the louder the radio was, unless he could talk.

And I was getting a bit fed up with it all now. So I just sort of turned the

radio up.

And he said...

He said, did I ever tell you about that guitar then?

I said, what guitar?

He said, the one, Paul McCartney's guitar.

So I said, no, and he started to laugh. So I turned the radio down.

He said, um, well, he said, I nicked it.

I said, what do you mean you nicked it?

He said, I didn't even know it was a guitar. He said, I just opened this fan

up.

He said, when I realised what it was, I thought, oh, you know, Paul McCartney,

it's the obvious shape, that proper shape guitar.

I can just imagine blessing his face.

Nick, the Mona Lisa, what are you going to do with that? You can't sell it. You

know, it's just one of those things.

It was that family up on the top floor.

They were ignored by Ian and Trevor on the day.

Nobody went with a wrench.

to those people up on the top floor.

And to be honest, they were ignored by us in the early days of the search.

And that is perhaps one of the most extraordinary things about this whole

story.

It got given to a pub landlord who run the Admiral Blake.

The landlord at the time was a chap called Ron.

He said, I just said to Ron, yeah, I'll tell you what, give this to one of your

kids, they can learn it. He said, just give us a couple of drinks.

I said, what?

He said, well, I just had a cut. He said he bought me a Daze with a light out.

So this guitar ended up with Ron and I think one of his kids, Graham, ended up

with it.

It had gone to a pub landlord called Ron Guest.

We knew that it had then been passed on to his son, Graham, who unfortunately

had died in this terrible car crash.

But then we decided to look at... the other children, and I was able to

contact Elaine Guest, who was the youngest of the children, and talk to

her.

That's me on the roof of the two dogs, because the roof was our garden.

I mean, I grew up with Graham always having a bass.

I can't remember a time when it suddenly appeared.

It was always Graham's bass.

It was just always playing, you know.

And he didn't mind if I plopped myself down and listened to it.

And where was it kept here?

In the little bedroom.

You don't think he would have known it was Paul McCartney's?

Definitely not.

Definitely not.

I mean, when you think about it, who in their right minds would buy a bass and

know it was Paul McCartney's and then give it to his son?

Who's going to take God knows where and somebody's going to say, but that's Paul

McCartney's bass.

But no.

Do you wish you'd played it a bit now?

Not now, I know.

It was serious, yes.

Were you into the Beatles?

No. No, no. I always thought the Beatles were like a girly band.

After Graham had died, her brother Hayden...

took the bass from their family home.

Hayden got divorced in the 1990s and then married someone else and then ended

up in Hastings.

He left his wife and kids and then got involved with somebody, and that's hence

why there's been no communication at all.

From what I can gather, the bass was just in the loft in the house at

Hastings.

We were in Los Angeles. We were rehearsing, I think.

And I got a phone call from a colleague, said, somebody's turned up at the farm

with a bass, and they think it might be Paul's, this lost bass that everybody's

talking about all of a sudden, because it had been in the press by then.

And she'd left some photos and then took the bass back.

So I was emailed the photos.

And I just had a feeling. I could feel it. I just thought, ooh, this is really

interesting.

And the next day, I was with Paul in the morning, and I had my laptop, and we

were about to leave for the studio, and I said, I've got something I need to

talk to you about. And he thought a second, but he said, oh, is it bad? I

said, no, it's not bad.

And I opened up my laptop, and I was shaking. I was literally shaking.

The minute I saw the case it was in, I, whoa, I've got it back.

Oh, my God.

And I'm checking it, and I'm thinking, well, yeah, that's it.

And, you know, that's how it looked, and this is definitely the case.

I remember carrying it in that case.

So I organized for somebody to go and pick it up.

And then I said, have you got it?

And he said, yep, it's here. I said, keep it. Don't let anybody... Just put

it away.

We partly let it out of our side.

I'm sitting at home on my

sofa. Kathy's sitting over there and my mobile phone goes and this voice comes

on and say, hey.

we've got the bass back, we've got the bass.

And I think, who's that, who's this, who are you? Then Penny dropped the accent,

the Liverpool accent, and I realised it was Paul McCartney.

We didn't quite know who to tell.

There were factors that meant we should keep it a secret for a bit longer till

we got our act together, till we've absolutely had everyone verify that it

was mine, people like Nick.

So it was sweet to be able to ring him up and say, guess what?

It was stunning.

You know, it was like, wow, what, really?

And I think I said to Paul, I think I'm going to go and get a beer out of the

fridge for this.

And he said, I would. He said, yeah. Is it a German beer like I used to drink in

Hamburg? It was just amazing because I could hear Paul on the phone to Nick and

it was just amazing.

That was incredible for us to just sit here thinking that Nick was in Germany,

Paul was in L.A., the bass was in Sussex, and we'd done it.

What happened for me over the last year, I've had two strokes, which has

certainly changed things for our life, and the bass has certainly

lightened that situation.

For us, I would say. Yeah, sure. Focus is the mind.

Paul McCartney's most treasured bass guitar that he had played throughout the

early days of the Beatles vanished without trace. Now, 51 years later, it

has been found.

James Dunham went to meet the mother of two who was unaware she was holding on

to an iconic instrument.

I was actually cataloguing lots of guitars that I've got and when I googled

it, it immediately came up.

I panicked and then went straight to his house because I knew he lived nearby and

I eventually found it after going through a lot of fields.

It had broken in the press that we were looking for this lost bass, and that

might have been one of the reasons Kathy thought, I better give it back.

There's this little side life it's gone off and living with all these people I

don't know.

And it ends up with Kathy.

Just remember, this is Paul's bass. This is that.

He really, truly cares and loves, and if you leave a guitar in a loft, it will

destroy a guitar, you know.

You've got to put it all together.

Put the strings on and then just play that first chord and just hope that you

got it right.

That's where the craftsmanship is, and Martin obviously is. An old-school

craftsman in the way he works, the way he does things.

He's poor people, it means a lot to you, but he doesn't really sort of, I'm not

that fussed about it.

I just think, obviously, it's just a guitar.

You know, now I get it. I get it now, but I still don't get it, get it,

really. You know, just leave it.

Leaving's nothing to be proud of, full stop.

But that said, we've all done it.

We've all done it.

But it's the iconic guitar that he

had in his hands.

The implication, the size of it, its meaning

to obviously Paul McCartney and other people, the enormity of it all is just a

bit sort of blimey.

Overwhelming. Yeah, a little bit, yeah.

I don't want anyone to think of Dad anything but a nice

lad, because that's what he was. He was a lovely, lovely lad.

But there wasn't always a receipt in the house for what we had.

It was just to make ends meet a little bit.

I don't blame him too much.

You know, I think it's just petty thievery.

It's the kind of thing we would have done a little bit of in Liverpool.

Just, you know, just... It's there and I could nick it, so I will.

We got out of that pretty quickly Because luckily the Beatles took over

and we found an honest profession But I can sympathize with people who don't

have that kind of look So I don't blame him too much

I'm

not comfortable.

I'm not all right with it

You sort of you're taking the name or my dad through muddy waters and that's not

what you do Growing up anyway, I don't remember my dad ever telling me he loved

me Not that that was a problem for me. It was just how it was

When We had a little boy

And I rang home he

He never told me.

Mum told me.

But I later found out that he cried.

Which, Dad never did that.

Dad never cried. I never saw my dad tear out my dad's eye.

God, I can't remember, I think.

But apparently he cried, because to Dad it meant the name would never go.

Did you just see the one I sent you?

The one with the glue?

Have you seen that one yet?

No. Oh, I've just sent... Oh,

I've just sent you another one with Martin actually gluing the neck back on.

Oh, lovely. Is that Martin?

Yeah, say hi.

Hello, Paul.

Hi, Martin. Your bass is saved.

I know. Thanks for doing this, man. It's great.

You're welcome.

I like his workshop.

Oh, yeah, lovely workshop. Well, look at his garden.

Oh, yeah, there you go.

How beautiful is that?

A little pond.

Beautiful.

Yeah, I can't wait to play it.

Yeah, it won't be long.

Have a good one, Paul. Thank you. Bye.

I feel that over the last 20 years or so...

Paul, to me, seems to appreciate more and more how good they were and how good

the songs were.

When he plays them, he really enjoys them. He thinks, this was a great song.

We really, really did well. And he's so proud of what they achieved.

So I think now him playing them on stage is big for him. I think he loves it.

He's come that full circle.

Okay, cool. I've actually got something you might want to see. You've got

something for me. A little something you might want to see. I believe it belonged

to you.

Do you want to come this way?

Oh, here it is.

Look at that.

Look at that.

He's done a brilliant job as well, hasn't he?

Oh, yeah. I wanted to show you that.

that's a little note from martin from martin many times i've had the pleasure

of putting music back into old broken instruments it's been an absolute joy to

do that with your bass so thanks and i hope you like it keep on trucking well

thank you martin you've done a great job yeah i love those kind of guys

50 years ago since you last played that.

It's crazy. It's true, isn't it? Yeah.

It's over 50 years, yeah. That's crazy.

But I'd love to know what you were doing.

Maybe rehearsing for something. Yeah, and if the van had been parked. I don't

know, yeah. I know, it was a long time ago. Well, the van's parked and the guys

go in for a couple of pints and they decide they should leave the van and go

home and come back in tomorrow morning.

Oops. slight mistake big mistake so it gets nicked yeah and then ends up with

the local uh is that a bit short strap yeah it's kind of a

bigger rounder sound yeah

there

she

is yeah

Welcome home, honey.

Look at that.

Wow.

Crazy story.

Yeah. Yeah.

You've got to go a long way to find somebody that's grown up without the

Beatles.

And I think there's something about the relationship between us all, you know,

normal people and the Beatles, and you sort of think you know them because you

know the music.

Good to see force chasing as well.

The music went global, but the bass, by going off on that weird route, the

minute it went from that van in Cambridge Gardens, it's gone into that

ordinary British world.

It's gone missing here, it's ended up here, in ordinary streets, ordinary

pubs, ordinary families.

And there's something incredible about that in its own right.

I'm trying to be humble, but, you know, I think I was an important jigsaw puzzle

piece, because, you know, I guess if I hadn't been a Beatle fan, if I hadn't

have met Steve, if I hadn't have played the guitar, these little things that

fall into place, it might just have been a different story. I might never have

found it.

Cheers to the old man. Absolute friends.

We didn't get it back just for Paul. We got it back for everybody who was a

Beatles fan.

All the kids like me were little kids back then.

We're old farts now, you know.

They could see that face once more, you know.

I did take it.

Yeah.

It's much better. The logo is totally different. Yeah, but that's the old

logo. Oh, yeah, early logo.

Yeah, right.

How does it feel?

It feels great.

Does it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, we've got to open the doors.

Hello. Oh, good to see you there. My love, fantastic to see you.

First time ever. Hello.

We meet at last.

Maybe he's going to play the bass. Who can tell?

So a little tale to tell you here.

A while ago, I had a bass besides

this one.

My original bass.

And it got nicked, to tell you the truth.

And we've been looking for it for 50 years.

Well, I got it back.

And here to make its first stage appearance in 50 years is my original

bass.

Well,

we'd love to see it in your hands if you're happy to grab it. I have it right

here.

There she is.

That's my old baby.

Do you find yourself getting a bit more reflective as you get older? Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, definitely.

Because it's so special.

Now, I don't have an amp.

These are just four guys in Liverpool who didn't know each other.

I got introduced to John via a schoolmate of mine.

And, yeah, I really liked him.

It's lovely to play.

And then George I knew off the school bus.

Then John was... looking for someone else to play guitar.

And I said, I've got this mate, you know, he's pretty good.

Yeah, he can get right up there and you wouldn't normally use that. I said to

George, go on, play it, he's looking.

So I encouraged George, so George got it out of the case and he plays a thing

called Raunchy, which is good and he did it great.

Then suddenly we had three other Beatles then and it only needed...

Ringo to show up for us to be complete

Jojo

was a man who thought he was a loner but he knew it couldn't last

Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona for some California

grass

Sit back JoJo.

Go home.