“We’ve been looking for it for 50 years, well, I got it back!” said McCartney, addressing the crowd at London’s O2 Arena. “And here to make its first stage appearance in 50 years… is my original bass! I haven’t played it in 50 years.”
Why so long? The bass, the one that started it all, was stolen out of the back of a van in west London, 1972.
McCartney has had many other Höfner basses in that time, but there is nothing quite like the original, the violin-style four-string that he used to change the face of popular music, recording tracks such as Love Me Do, She Loves You and I Wanna Hold Your Hand.
Decades on, and with the help of the internet, a campaign was launched to reunite Macca with his instrument. The Lost Bass Project took the search global, and it paid off. In September last year, it was found in a house in Sussex.
It had been in the attic all along. The BBC reported that the bass was originally stolen in Ladbroke Grove, before being sold to a pub landlord. After it was found it was authenticated by Höfner and McCartney, he was reunited with the bass in February.
McCartney’s OG Höfner is one of the greatest value purchases in the history of popular music – maybe only Nile Rodgers and his Hit-Maker Stratocaster could rival it. McCartney picked it up in Germany for just £30 while the Beatles were making their bones in their Hamburg era.
“I found a nice little shop in the centre of Hamburg, near a big department store called Karstadt,” said McCartney, speaking with Tony Bacon in 1994. “And I saw this bass in the window, this violin-shaped Höfner. It was a good price, because my dad had always said I shouldn’t do the never-never [buy on credit], but we were earning reasonable money. I liked the Höfner’s lightness, too. So I bought it, and I think it was only about 30 quid.”
Last night it was paying off some more of that £30. McCartney looks a little surprised that it worked when he plugged it in (a bit of theatre; he knows it’s going to be okay), and it had lost known of its power during a hectic performance of Get Back, with Ronnie Wood on guitar.
For Beatles fans, however, the best was saved for last, with McCartney welcoming Starr to the stage for an encore of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and White Album classic Helter Skelter.
He closed the set out with three Beatles classics: Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight and The End.
