(London) Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney was able to find a bass guitar missing for more than 50 years, on which he played Love Me Do, She Loves You And Twist and Shout in the studio and on stage.
According to Paul McCartney’s website, the instrument, a violin-shaped Hofner purchased for 30 pounds sterling (around $870 at today’s prices) in Hamburg, Germany in 1961, has been authenticated and “Paul is incredibly grateful to all those who participated” in the research.
The bass was found “complete”, but its original case “requires repairs”, said in a press release The Lost Bass Project, which launched an appeal to find the instrument in 2018 and whose campaign saw a renewed media interest last fall.
Contrary to what the initiators of the project, the journalist couple Scott and Naomi Jones, initially thought, the instrument had not disappeared in 1969, but was stolen in 1972 from the back of a van in the west of London.
Among the 600 calls and messages received, one proved decisive, Naomi Jones explained on BBC Radio 4 on Friday, making it possible to “put the puzzle together”.
According to Scott Jones, the thief lived in one of the squats in Ladbroke Grove in Notting Hill, an area that is now bourgeois, but at the time populated by “musicians, artists and hippies”.
The author of the theft, explains the journalist, was unaware of the identity of the illustrious owner of the instrument, and when he learned it, asked the owner of the local pub to hide his loot.
“What’s incredible is that when we started this research, we thought” that the bass “could be anywhere in the world,” emphasized Naomi Jones, but in fact, everything was played out in a perimeter of “a few miles” in the Notting Hill area.