Hamburg, Germany. 1961.
A young Paul McCartney, playing with a band called the Beatles, buys a bass guitar for £30. It is a Höfner, made by a German guitar company, with a body shaped like a violin.
McCartney is left-handed, and this bass looks the same from either side. “Because I was left-handed, it looked less daft because it was symmetrical,” he said later. “And once I bought it, I fell in love with it.”
The Beatles soon became the most famous band in the world, and the £30 bass went with them. It is the bass on the band's first two albums, and on songs such as “Love Me Do,” “She Loves You” and “Twist and Shout.” Right up to the band's final days, he kept it as a backup.
Then it disappeared.
Its last known appearance was in 1969, a few days before the Beatles played live for the last time. After that, there was no trace of it. Nobody was entirely sure when it had gone missing, or how.
Had it been lost, sold or stolen? Was it lying forgotten in a cupboard somewhere, or hanging on a stranger's wall?
For decades, nobody could say. The bass from the Beatles' first records had simply vanished.
McCartney wanted it back. Years later, he asked Höfner, the company that made it, to help find it.
The people who later went looking for it called it “the most important bass in history,” and its loss the “greatest mystery in the history of rock and roll.”