It sometimes feels as if a week doesn’t go by without a legacy-building documentary about Paul McCartney. The latest is this geeky tale about the 1961 Höfner bass guitar, the unmistakable violin-shaped instrument which, as a teenager in 1961, he bought for the equivalent of £30 in Hamburg, and which became a part of the Beatles’ iconography. After the band split, it went missing and was finally recovered in 2024, after more than 50 years, thanks to some dogged detective work, initiated by Nick Wass, a Höfner employee, and involving a certain ambulance service worker called Steve Glenister who responded to Wass’s calls for information, but was weirdly reluctant to say quite how much he knew.
It is an amiable tale with a happy ending but, oddly, the film can’t quite absorb the sadness, and even shame, that are disclosed in the denouement. Stealing by people who are hard up, and for whom opportunistic thievery is an instinctive mode of survival and whose grownup children may not, a generation later, want to think about what their parents did – these are big, sombre ideas with big sombre implications that don’t quite mesh with the documentary’s happy mood board.
Disconcertingly, perhaps, the Höfner bass was not unique. McCartney bought a second one a couple of years after the first: the “’63 bass”, as distinct from the “’61 bass”. Equally disconcertingly for Wass, who was spearheading the campaign to find out about the lost instrument, it wasn’t until his appeal was up and running that McCartney’s memory was jogged and he revealed exactly when and where the ’61 original was nicked: from the back of a Wings roadie van parked in Ladbroke Grove in west London in the early 1970s during a Wings tour. And because he associated that bass with the Beatles, he wasn’t even that fussed at the time. “I’ve got another one.”
In those days, Ladbroke Grove was a pretty lively countercultural neighbourhood, a place of anarchists, dope-dealers, squatters and people exploited by unscrupulous landlords. The shadow of suspicion fell on the band Hawkwind, who lived very near where the van had been parked, and their supremely dodgy roadie/dealer/keyboardist Michael “DikMik” Davies, who died in 2017.
If Hawkwind had been responsible for this pop-cultural larceny it would have been hilarious – but the real culprit was much less rock’n’roll, and when he realised that such an item could never be sold, he wound up giving it to a pub landlord, and from there it ended up in Hastings. The personal story behind the theft – the real story, in fact – is sadder, and more banal and more painful, than the film can quite acknowledge. As for McCartney, he forgivingly says that nicking things almost for a lark is the sort of thing that he and his mates might have done themselves, back in the day. It’s a diverting footnote.
McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass is in UK cinemas on 2 and 4 April, and on BBC Two and iPlayer on 11 April.