Much has been written about the disappearance and remarkable recovery of Paul McCartney’s storied Höfner 500/1 violin bass.
Now, Wings' former sound engineer Ian Horne has looked back on the day it first went missing, saying it “felt like the worst moment of my life.”
Beatles fans know all too well why the bass was such a treasured item. Bought for a humble £30 in Hamburg during the band's famed residency in the city, it was used to within an inch of its life, played for hundreds of gigs and on early '60s hits such as She Loves You.
It was later semi-retired to be a back-up bass, but it remained in the not-too-distant background, coming with McCartney as he formed Wings in light of the Fab Four's breakup.
It famously went missing after it was stolen out the back of a van in 1972, and its whereabouts remained a mystery until, 50 years later, the Lost Bass Project successfully tracked it down in 2024. Miraculously, it was found in an English attic.
It was a wonderful, happy ending, and the bass marked its live return alongside Ronnie Wood in late ‘24. But half a century earlier, it was a horror story for Horne. Equipment, after a tiring studio session, was stored in a three-ton truck with a roller shutter at the rear. It was there from which it was plucked.
Speaking to RadioTimes about that fateful day in October 1972, he says: “It felt like the worst moment of my life. I walked up to the truck, saw the padlock on the ground, and my heart sank.
“When I pushed the shutter up, I saw straight away that it was gone,” he continues. “The bass wasn’t there. There were lots of nice people in the hippie culture, but there were some dodgy people about as well.”
Horne says he and fellow Wings crew member Trevor Jones knocked on the doors of nearby residents “in a sort of threatening manner” as they hunted for, at best, the bass, at worst, a nugget of information. But it was to no avail.
“I realized I had to go and tell Paul in person,” Horne remembers. “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,” he says. “But Paul was lovely about it. He said, ‘It’s all right, I’ve got another one.’”
Not only that, but McCartney was apparently eager for the story of the instrument's theft not to leak, fearing it would damage Horne's professional reputation. It could explain why there was little fanfare about its quiet disappearance at the time.
McCartney has since met with the man who reunited him with the bass, while Höfner's own future is set for a restructure after it filed for bankruptcy in December.
