Original subtitles

Hey, guys. How's it going?

Okay.

Right.

The Lost Base.

Yay.

It's a story. It is a story. It's quite a thing, yeah.

And this being my first bass that I got in Hamburg.

all those years ago.

I had an attachment to it, you know?

It just went off into the universe, you know? It's like, where did it go?

There must be an answer, you know?

Somebody's got it.

And as you see, if you think what's being written in that... This

was one of the main places we used to sit and write songs.

The sneak bunk off school, come in here, eat some fried eggs. There's a thing

about fried eggs, I don't know why, anyway.

They go to Hunter Davison's story, they're all eating fried eggs. They must

have been just after the war, they must have just loved fried eggs. This is

where we used to live.

Our humble abode in Forthden Road, Allerton, Liverpool.

And this is where we used to live as a little family.

And there's some people out there. What are they doing there?

That's why we left.

Lots of lovely memories.

Not enough of my mum.

the smells that would have come from the kitchen.

When she did Sunday dinners, she'd do off cuts of lamb or beef

and sneak them in to us, our little boys.

Shh, don't tell your dad.

Shh.

You see, whenever I talk about my mum, it's always dangerous, because this is

where she went from.

This is our kids' little room.

Yeah, I stopped them going in there for many years

because it was too important for me.

I'm a brother.

I was 12, my brother was 14, and she died of cancer.

when you're 12 or 14.

You don't understand.

You have to get on with life. You have to survive.

And because Dad had been in his own band, at the back of his mind,

he always thought, well, that was a way out.

And so he bought me a banjo and my brother a guitar, a Spanish guitar.

I took that out the back window.

Our kid was sitting in the back garden lost just miles

away with his guitar.

My brother was 14 in that photograph.

Beatlemania came six years later.

If I'm in a not very good mood A great thing to do is just take a guitar,

because you think about it, you sort of hold it to you, you know, a guitar, and

it's kind of a comforting thing to do.

You go off into a little room somewhere, you know, on your own, and tell the

guitar your troubles, kind of thing. It's like a cheap psychiatrist, really.

And it turns round and the guitar sort of sends it back to you, and it comes

back as a song somehow.

Well,

it started in Hamburg.

You had gangsters, pimps, you had prostitutes,

you had all you could imagine.

Hamburg is echoing to the invasion from the latest beat groups from Britain

who've taken over.

I heard the music through a window, a cellar window.

I just wanted to see that rock and roll music.

The next band came on and that was The Beatles.

Paul came up, and I think he was the one who talked to the audience first,

because he could speak German. Hello, wie geht es?

Guten Tag, sir.

It was really sweet.

I mean, they were young kids.

George was 17, you know.

And I was a little older then, you know.

We became friends, and they came to the house. They got great food.

Put them in a bathtub.

Because they didn't have any mother or father to look after them.

It was a friendship. A friendship grew up, you know.

Oh,

danke schön.

Hey, Klaus. Paul here.

And trying to reach you so we can have a nice...

He is still that same little Paul he was when he was 19 years old, you know.

It's the same guy.

I'm a graphic designer.

I had the job to do the cover on Revolver and the bass player.

But now I can't play any guitar chords without this cramp in the hand. I can't

do a fist.

I can't do a fist, you know. It doesn't work.

It doesn't work.

Luckily enough, I can still hold my pencil.

I'm going to do drawings of the story of the bass.

I decided to start with the top ten.

That's the first time I actually saw the bass.

So what do you want to talk about? We want to talk about you as a bass player,

really.

So you've got Paul's guitar, and next to it, Stuart Sutcliffe's guitar.

My bass guitar days go back to when Stuart was the bass player.

Stuart had fallen in love with this girl called Astrid.

Stuart decided he was going to stay in Hamburg, and so that meant we didn't

have a bass player.

And John and George told him, I'm not doing it.

So that left me.

Eventually then, I found a nice little shop in the centre of Hamburg.

And I saw this bass in the window, the violin-shaped bass, the Hoffner.

I don't think it was very expensive, something like about 30 quid.

Then once I got my own bass, then I was a bass player.

I remember it was the last day the band played in the Top Ten Club,

and Stuart, it was his last night of playing.

And we were sitting outside, the sun was shining, I think it was Sunday morning.

And we were all sitting there, being all pretty stoned, stoned meaning failure in

pills and stuff, talking, talking, talking.

John was sitting next to me and I said, well, Stuart isn't playing. I could play

the bass.

And he said, oh, sorry, Klaus, Paul already bought the bass. He's going to

be the next bass player.

Could be in your moment, Klaus. You could have become Beatle No. 5.

Yeah, all right.

I don't know. Anyway, I don't even want to think about it.

I lived in Hamburg through my brother's letters.

Then suddenly he came back one day and he had that Hofner.

It's so unique.

We were the roadies.

I probably held that bloody thing.

And then our kid got a Ford Classic.

Look cool.

And their music then, you know, going to the cabin.

The difference was unbelievable. It was like, whoa, wow,

what happened?

We knew we were going somewhere. We always felt that we had something.

They did with John Lennon.

You know, he's a very witty cat.

With me, who could hold his own.

With George, who was, like, spectacular.

And then finish it all up with Ringo.

So we had a kind of magic.

I'm the least technical person you'll meet.

So I don't know what I do.

I just play with it.

It's a lovely instrument to play and it's kind of easy to play.

And so I got very used to it and loved it.

This Hofner bass really suited Paul's style of play. It's very rhythmical, but

at the same time it's very, very melodic.

You can hear lots of songs that the songs are very very simple and the bass

does more movement than any other instrument

I'm

a big fan of James Jamison who was the Motown bass player because normally bass

is

But he was going... I was going, wow, that's a great way to use the bass.

That set me free.

I was like, great, OK, I can make up melodies.

So as the guys were doing the main song, I would just try and put something

imaginative behind it.

It was a great feeling. I mean, I still remember it, the moment.

Bingo!

First time I was aware of the Beatles, I'd have been about nine years old.

My clear memory of that is seeing them on the six o'clock television news.

And all the girls were screaming outside the cinemas and that kind of thing.

They were playing electric guitars.

And let's face it, you know, electric guitars are so sexy.

My mother would have thought it not the right thing to have an electric guitar.

That was for bad boys, you know.

Years later, I was the electric guitar manager with Hofner, a small German

guitar company.

Subsequently, I'd met Paul McCartney. It was at his studio down south in England.

He just walked in and said, oh, hello, you're Mr Hofner. Do you know where my

old Hofner's gone?

And I knew what he meant, Australia White, my old Hofner. He meant the 61

bass.

We'd been looking for my old bass for years.

But that's what happened with Nick. I started talking about it and just

saying, yeah, we're looking for it. I don't know if we'll ever find it.

Of course, I had to say, you know, I've got no idea where it's gone.

It's all a bit of a mystery.

It's the most important bass of any bass ever, anywhere.

In terms of anybody actually totally associated with an instrument, yeah,

McCartney and the Hofner bass.

There's just something in the soul of the two of them.

Here's the old Hofner factory down in Bavaria.

Well, it's still standing.

Poor old place.

And it was here...

in these premises that they built the base all those years ago.

That moment, that turn in history, you almost had to be there,

really, to feel the electricity in the air.

I was probably bored on a wet Wednesday.

I designed and put up the web page on the Hofner website.

The usual sort of things, if you've got any information, email us. And I think

Cathy came up with the name Trace the Base with the hashtag on the front.

Yes. I think it was you, was it? It was me, yes. Well, there you are. Genius.

Very catchy.

Genius, you see. Trace the Base.

The whole of our marriage, you know, for the last 20-odd years.

Kathy's just supported me with one lunatic scheme after another, you know,

and she used to be a bank manager. She's good at filing stuff.

We talked about it endlessly.

Endlessly, yeah.

I don't think there was one purpose in searching for the base.

There was 100 million fans out there who I knew would be thrilled to bits to know

that this thing had come back.

So it was for everybody, not just Paul.

I was in Liverpool, so I could go every game that I could afford to go to.

27,000 people used to be on the call.

And very emotional sound.

Among the many things I memorized before I picked up an instrument were the

harmony parts.

I can't sing in Paul's register now, but I could then when I was a kid.

And we would cut out cardboard likenesses of the guitars we liked and

draw the controls on them and then mime along with records.

It was a perfect apprenticeship for being on top of the pops, you know,

pretending to play.

The hardest thing was to make a Hofner bass because you needed a longer piece

of cardboard for the neck. This is like when I'm nine or something, you know.

Well, the thing about the Hofner is it's very lightweight, which is great.

It makes it easier to play.

So that was the one on all the early Beatles records.

So it was a very rich period for music, for us, particularly for making records.

That bass was used an enormous amount.

And it started to fall to bits.

And we don't know when, again, because all the records are long gone.

They ordered another Hofner bass.

We think it gets delivered into his hand on October 4th, 1963.

They did a gig on an old TV programme called Ready Steady Go.

And there's pictures of him at rehearsal.

And pictures of him actually doing the performance to camera, and both bases

are there.

He's got the 61 from Hamburg.

It has two pickups close together.

And he's got this new one.

They've moved this pickup down to near the bridge.

And in some of the shots, he's got the new one, and he's holding it out, but it

hasn't even got a strap on it.

So we're kind of concluding that it arrived that very day.

And the 61 gets put on backup duties, poor thing.

Within a couple of months of that, the February, they're playing in front of 70

million people in the USA.

Meanwhile, the 61 base was away being repaired.

Our roadie, Mal, took it off and brought it back like

new, but with a completely different paint job on it.

When it returned, it had been completely re-sprayed.

And it came back with what's now called a three-part sunburst, which is more or

less black, red, yellow.

It's very distinctive when you look at this bass now.

For me, the whole charm of that instrument was gone.

I don't know how Paul feels about it. I think he was a bit pissed off too.

Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head.

Found my way downstairs and drank a cock. And looking up, I noticed I was

late.

Found my coat and grabbed my hat.

Made the bus in seconds flat.

Found my way upstairs and had a smoke.

And somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

i mean from a look point of view i think the 63 is nicer maybe even better

better pickups better sound louder whatever

he's very singularly played that 63 bass then continuously and

you never see him playing the 61 you know he didn't swap and change between

the two or anything they went back to america in 1965.

The 61 is being used as a backup, but not played.

If you look really carefully, you see Ringo up on the jump riser, and just

down below Ringo on the back of the amp, there's the bass.

You have to look very eagle-eyed that it's there.

What happened to it after that is a mystery.

It's just luck and a lot of sort of peering at grainy old black-and-white

pictures.

The only time you see it again, you have to wait till a quick shot of it by the

coffee table and the Let It Be sessions, and then we don't see it any more.

It's just not around.

Get back!

Get back!

Get back to where you want.

Get back.

The event is so momentous that historians may one day view it as a

landmark in the decline of the British Empire.

The Beatles are breaking up.

And when they split up, I mean, all the rancour starts, you know, the lawyers

are in, and it was chaotic.

There were guitars here, there were guitars there, and nobody was really

taking care of stuff.

This is the remarkable thing, is from the end of the Beatles, nobody had ever

seen this bass.

It just wasn't there anymore.

I was never able to establish any firm basis.

as to when it disappeared.

I put my hand up absolutely and say, I started this from nowhere, not knowing

how to do it.

So I was kind of a bit handicapped, I suppose, and as green as a cabbage as

well.

It had got to the point where it needed somebody better than me to start poking

about.

It was June 2022, and I was watching Paul McCartney headline at Glastonbury.

But there was one moment in the show where the stage just went black, apart

from one light just picking out Paul's Hofner bass.

And it just caught the varnish and the wood and everything. It was almost like

shining like gold for this split second. And I thought, is that the original

Hofner bass?

So I Googled it and saw that it wasn't.

The original bass that he'd got in 1961 was lost.

And I instantly started Googling to see and find out more about that story.

But in terms of an investigation and then thinking, I want to find this

thing, I thought, well, if no one else is doing that, and that guitar is so

important, we need to do it.

Who do you mean by we?

Me and my wife, we worked together.

And we convinced ourselves that we may not find the base, but we'd find stories

about the base. We'd find what the base meant to people.

You know, that sort of Beatlemania fan thing.

By July 2023, I'd seen that Hofner over in Bavaria

had ran a search.

And I was really curious to find out what they know.

So I wrote this very polite email, sort of introduced myself, thinking he was

German and being conscious of the English language that I was using.

And then within 24 hours, I realised that Nick was from London and he was on

the end of the phone and we were talking like old mates.

And I thought, oh my God, these are exactly the people I've been looking for

for a long time.

We got together and I said to Scott, well, look, I've got a lot of emails and

I passed him a lot over for him to read and get a sense of what we were dealing

with there.

All of these leads that came in, you knew it was people that had lived with

this story for a long, long time.

It's just that it was wrong.

A man claiming he had one of Paul's guitars walked into a pawn shop in Las

Vegas called the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop to sell it.

There's a television program called The Pawn Stars where it was aired.

Hope it helps.

I definitely saw the bass in an auction of music equipment in the mid-80s in

London. It sold for £100 to a music rental studio company.

I've heard that the bass is in Japan in the possession of a Japanese banker.

This information was given me to a guy that knows the Beatles and the Beatles

gear website well.

I had this vision of, I used to say to people, i know what's happened some

german guy rich german guy has nicked it and he's got a big castle in the

bavarian mountains and he invites you up and then after a few drinks he says come

i show you something special and there over the mantelpiece is hanging my base

so it's a treasure hunt but also people loved

The Beatles and loved Paul McCartney and wanted to help.

I've always admired Paul McCartney as a bass player.

He made the bass guitar call.

Beatle fans know that the bass has disappeared, and no one knows where it's

gone, so it'd be amazing if somebody ever did find it, because that's

history, isn't it? It's history.

Yeah, ever since I can remember I've been a Beatles fan. It's only ever been

one band for me, I think.

First time I ever opened the Sgt. Pepper's, and you opened it up and

they've all got moustaches.

And I thought, when I get older, I'm gonna have a moustache, you know?

So... I bought it secondhand.

Only paid £80 for it, which is not much more than Paul paid for his, probably.

Are you playing a thing on it?

A little bit day-tripper, but... Yeah, only a little bit.

I did a pletrum.

I've always wanted to play the guitar. I've tried for years and I thought it

might be easier to play bass because there's only four strings.

And it's a Vox.

Vox. You have to have a Vox, don't you, if you have a Beatles bass.

Oh no.

After all that, mate, it's broken.

Cut.

Got there in the end. Yeah, practice makes perfect, doesn't it?

I work for the ambulance service. I've been doing it 23 years

now. So I'm on the patient transport side, so it's all non-emergency.

There's a guy, Steve, I work with. He's a lovely guy.

I've known him for two, three years. We always have a good laugh when we crewed

up together.

We bounce off each other quite nicely.

I'm always looking online for guitars and things, and I think I just might

have been by accident, went onto the Hofner website, saw that Nick Waz was

looking for it.

And that was like, yeah, the Holy Grail for me.

It's like finding the Bible, trying to find Paul McCartney's bass.

If you're a fan, that's like, wow.

Well, I was with Steve one day.

I said, well, I've still got a bass that's a bit like Paul McCartney's. And

he just sort of said, I think I know where that is.

And I said, you're joking, aren't you?

So I just said to him, I said, I've got an idea where that might be, you know.

And he sort of looked at me and I went, right, I'm going to tell you something.

I don't know if it's right or proper, but I'm going to tell you something.

It's only a story I've heard.

He said, where? So I said, we don't know where. I said, but I think it was nicked

from a house in London.

So I said, Steve, can I?

Tell the story. Can I tell Nick what little bit you've told me?

I said, don't put my name on it.

No, he said, what we'll do, he said, I'll email it in and say it's a story

that someone told us on the back of the ambulance.

A patient.

I mean, the emails were quite mixed, if I'm honest.

One of them in particular was from these two guys who are a crew on an ambulance.

And they tell me this bullshit story about having a client in the back of the

ambulance, as they described him. What, a patient?

Yeah, but I think they call it client now, don't they?

Who'd given them some story about the fact that the base had been stolen

and that it had been given to a guy in a pub

up at Labyrinth Grove, London.

And I thought... yeah a bit more but i wrote a polite reply

that sounds like a really good book tales from the back of an ambulance and

i left it there

i

had a call from the news editor at the telegraph looking for stories and i said

well look we're looking for paul mccartney's lost base

And the minute I said it, Ben commissioned the story on the spot.

The story in The Telegraph went live on the 2nd of September.

It was a Saturday.

It was around about 4 o'clock online.

Within minutes, the BBC were in touch.

So they wanted us on BBC Breakfast.

Well, delighted to say we're joined now by Nick Wass, who is a Hofner and lost

bass expert, and he's provided Paul McCartney with many of his iconic

instruments. Lots of interviews and radio station interviews, day and night.

I realised why being famous must be absolutely awful.

The difference with the Lost Base is Paul McCartney had it refinished in

1964. And the two pickups are now mounted in a big black piece of wood

here. But I think you've shown your audience some pictures of what we're

after. Yeah. This is it. Yeah. And the thing is, so it is distinctive and it

should be identifiable.

But, of course, it may have been destroyed somewhere along the line. It

may have been tucked away. It could have been taken by someone at the Apple

offices. We just don't know, do we?

No, we don't know. This is the problem.

It was put away, presumably, after they finished filming it. And after that,

nobody has any clear idea of what happened.

Where it was actually stored, it might have been there.

We're just not clear about it.

In the first 24 hours, we must have had more than a dozen major newspapers and

radio and TV stations on NBC in America and the New York Times and Le Monde.

Yeah, Le Monde.

The Spiegel in Germany. It just went on and on. And then TV channels that we'd

never, ever heard of were getting...

in touch from brazil and other places we thought that we'd

almost plugged into that spirit of the Beatles you know we thought

that we had connected with that positive vibe around peace and love and the

band and what the music meant to people we got 600 emails in the

first 48 hours And the emails were just landing and landing and landing.

That's when the journalists in us took over and we started to pick out what

could be really important.

I heard the news today, old boy.

When we read Ian Horne's email, we knew instantly that we had to speak

to Ian.

And Ian's lead was the only lead that said, I know Paul McCartney.

And it was the only lead that said, I worked for Paul McCartney.

After he broke up with the Beatles, we met up.

I think Paul was definitely getting back in the saddle, I call it, which was a

big step, because I think he hid away for a while.

Yeah, you know, it was very depressing, you know, because you were breaking from

your lifelong friends.

You weren't going to see him again.

It was depressing.

I'm not knowing whether I was going to continue in music.

Suddenly I wasn't having a good time. It wasn't working.

It was Linda who sort of said, you know, you just, you've got to get it together

and we've got to do something.

So we ended up forming Wings.

I knew that if I...

kept playing Beatles songs, which I knew people wanted, then I would become a

Beatles tribute band.

And I thought, maybe that's not the greatest look.

He was experimenting with things he hadn't done before.

And a Yamaha bass, a Fender bass, so he went through the basses he saw people

playing, you know.

We went on the road.

Boy, did we go on the road. Tell us about it. I mean... Well, because the

thing is, you know, normally you go on the road, at least you book hotels.

You know, anyone books hotels.

But we decided to really just bust the whole thing.

So we had a tranny and we just headed off up the motorway.

We had the kids, a couple of dogs, the whole group.

All our instruments... There was a U-Haul following behind with the... The

roadies. The roadies.

And we literally turned up at universities and stuff. We turned up at

Nottingham University was the first one.

And we said... In fact, we didn't. I didn't say anything. I stayed in the

van. One of the lads, Ian Horne, actually, went in. Well, you know, I've

got Paul McCartney out in the van. Do you want him on lunchtime tomorrow?

Really? I need to come out in the van to sort of check.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we'll have him.

He was loving it, being back in the saddle.

He never played the Hofner, as far as I know. It was around.

So lugging it around from place to place?

Yeah, maybe that's more me than him.

I mean, if he asks for it, I've got it.

We'd just finished the university tour and we were recording an album called

Red Rose Speedway.

Well, on this particular day, we'd been in the studio and we didn't leave until

quite late, so we drove back to Trevor's.

Yeah, Trevor's my brother-in-law.

He was my assistant.

So we had a truck full of gear, which we had the Hoffnett bass, acoustic guitars.

Some amplifiers.

I couldn't park at Trevor's because obviously Trevor's house was a school,

so it was restricted parking.

Just went up the road a bit to the right and there's a tea junction there, which

is Cambridge Gardens.

There's a parking place right on the edge, so I thought I'd put it there with

the back of the truck visible to everybody.

Basically, I had a big heavy-duty padlock on the back. It was a roller

shutter on the back.

So I felt fairly secure.

I walked back to Trevor's and we went to sleep.

And then, of course, in the morning, the nightmare began.

You could see that the padlock was off.

And I went, oh, God.

It was cold sweat.

So I throw the roller door up and immediately notice there's stuff

missing, you know.

There's a couple of amplifiers, two guitars, including the Hofner bass.

I was beside myself with worry and anger and pain.

Right opposite where the truck is, so the back of the truck there is 100.

Cambridge Gardens.

At the time, it seemed kosher.

But all these hippies and people that lived around Lancaster Road and

Cambridge Gardens and these squat houses and a lot of musicians.

You know, obviously thieves amongst them.

Trevor thought this guy Dick Mick was a bit iffy, you know. Why?

I don't know why, really.

He flagged him up. I didn't flag anyone.

I did feel it was one of that mob because they all knew we weren't for

Paul.

And so, you know, we sort of got tooled up in case it got nasty.

So wait, hang on, in case what got nasty?

I decided we'd go and check this guy out so we could end the thing there.

So we went in there, kind of threatening the baby.

Dick Mick was still in bed, he was shitting himself.

We looked round, no stuff.

And eventually, you know, we had to go to Paul and tell him the news.

Knock on the door and he comes to the door.

The truck's been broken into.

The Hofner base has been stolen and a few other things.

And I sort of took a deep breath and stood there thinking, right, what's

going to come back at me?

And he was absolutely amazing. He just turned around and he says, right, Ian,

I've got another one.

I had a feeling in me, did he think I've done it?

So I rang the police.

And the police didn't seem that bothered.

I think all the papers used to have contacts in the police, their friends on

the news desk. Maybe they'd get a small payment. That's the way it used to work.

So in this particular case, the standard had got a tip off that this had

happened, but they didn't know very much about it, or even if it was true.

Obviously, the best person to confirm whether a guitar of his had been stolen

would be him.

I set off for his house, and I didn't feel very comfortable about doing this.

I didn't think that this was the kind of journalism I really wanted to do.

And I thought that if he did come out, he was going to tell us to fuck off.

Probably an hour passed, standing around on the road, chatting to the

photographer.

Suddenly, without any warning, a wooden gate swung open and there was Paul.

I can clearly remember his first words were, ''What do you want, boys?''

And the first question I think I asked him, first of all, to confirm that the

guitar had been taken, and he said it had, so that confirmed the story and he

confirmed that it was the original one that he'd bought back in Hamburg.

which I knew about because I'd followed the Beatles.

So then I suddenly realised that I was actually in the middle of a very big

story. The most famous or iconic instrument of that era had been

stolen and I was talking to the guy who owned it.

And he was quite happy to chat about it. He posed for pictures for the

photographer, and I think we probably spoke for maybe four or five minutes.

And at that stage, our presence had started to get noticed. A small crowd of

people had started to gather.

So he politely thanked us and closed the gate and went back into the house.

This was the first time I had met a Beatle.

The Beatles music has enriched my life enormously.

And I just kind of felt, maybe this sounds a little bit sycophantic, but I

just really felt that I would like to have said, can I just thank you for

everything you've done? I think your music's great.

It's something which will stay with me forever.

Just something like that.

Just a thank you. I think that would have been nice. But I was in a rush and

I never got to do that.

Paul had given a quote to a newspaper at the time, and so we thought

that you would remember that, or you'd remember, you know, it was his favourite

base, it had been stolen.

Nick was scratching his head as to why he hadn't been told that that

information hadn't been passed on.

I have to presume that he'd forgotten.

I mean, this is a guy who's... actually done quite a lot isn't he you know he's

been a few places and around so he might well have just not registered with him i

don't know there has been a report recently that you have said that you

might get back with the beatles is this true no i wouldn't think so i don't

think any of us fancy tell you the truth

Perhaps the bass wasn't as important to Paul in 1972 as it was to him when he

asked Nick to start the search.

I think in a way the Beatles have done it, you know?

The Beatles started from nothing and got everywhere.

The thing is, you know, I don't know whether anyone really would even like to

even try and push it any further, you know?

The Hoffner was a Beatle bass and he wasn't a Beatle anymore.

I don't blame him, you know.

Those guys had had a hell of a life.

For all their fame and their money, they'd had a hell of a time.

I think the Hofner was part of that time.

And they just wanted it gone.

Ian thought that the base had gone into 100 Cambridge Gardens.

So we were interested to find out more about this character, Dick Mick, that at

that time certainly Trevor suspected and Ian did as well.

Dick Mick was a roadie and he'd been a weed dealer.

We were able to find that in the basement flat of 100 Cambridge Gardens,

a band called Hawkwind and a lot of members of the band called the Pink

Fairies lived.

Trevor and Ian, they were both very good friends of mine.

There was the next day when I saw Trevor and he just said, fuck, he says Paul's

bass got stolen out of the van last night outside Cambridge Garden. I said,

what?

They said, keep your ears peeled and, you know, see if there's any word coming

out or any word on the street or... Dick, Mick, who was Dick?

Dick Mick was one of the people in the original Hawkwind.

Dick Mick was unfortunately most of the time out of his head on mandrax.

But he could have been outside blagging away or leaning against the van or

whatever, having a smoke.

You know, somebody could have said, oh, whose van's that? Oh, it's Wing's van,

you know.

I heard reports of Hawkwing's gear going missing.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. The whole dynamic around Hawkwind is,

you know, somewhat troubled.

In May 1972, Hawkwind had had £10,000 worth of kit

stolen from their van.

In old newspaper searches, we found out that they'd been banned from the BBC.

because they'd stolen a microphone.

I think, didn't they write a song that was sort of anti the Beatles? They were

anti the Beatles. They were anti the Beatles, so they felt quite anarchic.

It felt like Hawkwind had a motive, and it also felt like they had the

personality to go and do it.

Ladbroke Grove was pretty funky.

You know, there was the hippies, there was the...

All the people who had the fruit and vegetables.

A lot of thugs showed up on Portobello Road and that's when things started to

go downhill.

You know, rougher.

People started injecting.

People started getting stuff stolen.

Paul Rudolph described a place with a lot of poverty.

a lot of people really clinging on that it wasn't a big deal for something to be

stolen out of the back of a van. It happened all the time.

The base did feel like that's the last place on earth it should really be.

Which is a long, long way from these dark, poorly lit streets.

You know, lots of political banners written on bed sheets sort of hanging

out the windows.

Anarchists and theft.

To picture the bass in the middle of all of that makes you feel like this little

thing is out there that desperately needs saving.

But then a penny dropped.

I thought, ah, I got an email about six months before this from a guy

talking about the base being stolen in Labrador Grove.

So I naturally went and dug back through the pile of emails and found it. It was

from a guy called Andrew, Andrew Dickinson.

And so, yeah, I contacted them and said, look, you know, something's occurred. We

didn't tell them what.

Further information's arisen.

Can they tell me more?

I didn't think we were going to hear any more, to be honest.

You know, it was a very small story to tell.

Whereabouts are you struggling?

Oh, just my neck.

He's, like, really digging in hard, you know? Yeah.

I think he was using his elbow or something.

I think they do a lot with their elbow. Yeah.

Dig in, you know.

Did you get a happy ending?

No, no, I didn't fancy it.

I got back to Steve and said, this Nick, he's emailed me again.

Next time.

I think, you know, it's your story to tell. Do you want to get involved and

say a little bit more?

Oh, God.

Straight away I thought, I've opened my mouth here and he's not going to let

this go now.

What I didn't want to come out was...

Our first house was just off of Ladbroke Grove, not far from Grenfell Tower.

It was quite a carousel of people coming and going, really.

I think I was made aware of who you could talk to and where you could go.

You had boundaries of where you could go and where you couldn't go.

So there was only so many people you were likely to get to meet or likely to

get to see.

Dad had a couple of jobs.

He played a lot of football, Saturdays and Sunday mornings.

Dad's mates, they would always tell me how good my dad was as a semi-pro

footballer. Because he was good, Dad.

There was a pub.

It's called the Admiral Blake.

And that's where they all used to congregate, my dad and his mates.

So occasionally I'd get taken across.

It was a good source of information, it was a good source of recreation.

It was just a good way of socialising and getting around and getting to know

what was going on and doing what around the area and stuff like that.

There was racketeering going on and people going round and if you want a

garden fork or a spade, there's a couple in the back of that lorry that no one

knows are there if you want that.

If you couldn't get rid of it or you hadn't sold it, take it out to the pub,

someone will have it off you.

Someone will buy it off you.

Because obviously I wasn't always crewed up with him, so I was getting little

bits of information here, there, everywhere, you know.

So he got to a stage where when I was looking at the road signs, I thought,

oh, I'm working with him again, I know what's coming here.

I'm just going to have to try and muddy the waters a little bit here because

he's not going to let it go.

He'd heard that it had been stolen.

from the road that they were in.

They sold it to the barman in the pub and then they sort of dumped it in the

canal just because they knew it was Paul McCartney's and they'd never be able to

get rid of it.

We got an A to Z out of the van.

I said, that was the pub, so there's the canal there, so I'm assuming there. So

he said, so whereabouts do you think? I said, I don't know, I wasn't there, so I

had no idea.

I said, but that's the canal. I said, if I lived in that pub... I would have

walked over that bridge and just lobbed it there. And then he said, do you

reckon we could get a boat and go and fight? I said, no.

No, I said, I don't think we can go and get a boat and go and fight.

I think Andrew replied to me saying he would ask his partner.

And then I get an email from Steve.

Now we had a strong lead. It's been stolen and it went on to this pub.

The email had said that it had been thrown into the canal.

That was quite a low point, really.

It was almost like, you know, the body of the guitar had been dumped into the

water there.

And I remember feeling that the result isn't what we wanted, but we might

actually have a story now that we know where Paul McCartney's base is, but

sadly it's at the bottom of that canal and probably gone forever.

Three, four.

My boss.

My manager at the time got a call from Paul's manager at the time.

Richard wants you to go down to work with Paul. I said, kid, no. He was like,

you know, I was 33, I think, when we started doing that.

He wasn't calling up an eight-year-old kid who was in the fan club.

One, two, three, four.

We got off to a flying start, you know.

And we'd just recorded with two guitars and vocals, and it was good fun.

There's a version of me singing My Brave Face where I'm singing lead, so Paul

could fly around on the bass, and he's doing all these moves, but I never felt

like he could hear the voice.

Because this bass was just too, it was too big sounding.

At some point I asked whether the whereabouts of the Hofner, and it

suddenly appeared.

Elvis Costello said, what about your Hofner bass, you know, your violin bass,

the Beatle bass?

And I was saying, well, I can try it, but it's not very good at keeping in

tune, which it isn't, because they're not very expensive instruments.

So I had given up recording with it, really, in favour of more modern

instruments. But he said, I love the sound of it, you know, go on.

But it wasn't the lost bass, the 61 bass.

This was his 63.

But I think at that point, things changed for Paul.

And it recorded great. It's got a lovely tone for a little bass.

Honestly, I felt vindicated when I heard the part. You could hear his personality

really clearly.

And it had the tone. It had the tone. It was like somebody singing, you know?

Elvis Costello suggested bringing that.

63, maybe that kind of like, you might have thought, yeah, what happened? Maybe

that's when the whole conversation sort of started up again about where is the

original one?

By the time we got 89, 90, when we were about to embark on a big, massive world

tour, and Paul said, what are people going to want to, you know, they're

going to come to a gig, what are they going to want?

They're going to want people's, they're going to want some big, big moments.

Close your eyes and I'll kiss you.

Tomorrow I'll miss you.

Remember I'll always be true.

And meanwhile I'm awake.

I'll write home every day.

And I'll send all my loving to you.

Paul's quite nostalgic about things.

They're important to him, not maybe in a collectible way, but just emotionally,

and they're part of his history and they're part of his life, and he, yeah,

he probably missed the bass.

He just wanted it back.

Yeah, well, I think anything that's nicked, you want back, you know,

especially if it has a sentimental attachment.

Plus, I was annoyed that someone nicked it.

You know, it's just like, how dare you? Give me it back, you know.

Very often in investigations, there's a breakthrough moment where you're

effectively given something on a plate.

Who's Stephen?

Who's this person? And how does he know so much about the theft of this guitar?

I made an inquiry about...

the residents of 100 Cambridge Gardens, so who was on the electoral register.

And I just remember reading through the list of names, and we got to the name

Glenister.

Oh, my God.

His parents are on the electoral register in 100 Cambridge Gardens.

He was on holiday in Spain and my phone went.

Is that Steve Clements? Yeah.

It's Nick Bass here from The Lost Base.

I said, oh, right. Hi, you all right?

He said, I think you know a little bit more than you're letting on.

Are you prepared to say anything? I said, not really. I don't know anything

other than I told you. And he said, well, I think you do.

I knew I had to ask him the question.

And say to him, look, Steve, just tell me what happened.

You know, I know you know, because you wouldn't have sent me all this stuff.

And I know you were in the house.

Just tell me what happened.

My dad used to come and watch me play football a lot.

He was never complimentary about the way I played. There was always something I

could have done better than that. So he was coming home one day and I had the

radio on in the car.

How old do you think you were at this point?

I may have just had the kids, so mid-20s, something like that.

This song come on.

And I just said, oh, it's the Beatles.

I like these.

And I'd done it more if the louder the radio was, the less he could talk.

And I was getting a bit fed up with it all now. So I just sort of turned the

radio up.

And he said...

He said, did I ever tell you about that guitar then?

I said, what guitar?

He said, the one, Paul McCartney's guitar.

So I said, no, and he started to laugh. So I turned the radio down.

He said, um, well, he said, I nicked it.

I said, what do you mean you nicked it?

He said, I didn't even know it was a guitar. He said, I just opened this fan

up.

He said, when I realised what it was, I thought, oh, you know, Paul McCartney,

it's the obvious shape of that, proper shape guitar.

I can just imagine blessing his face.

Nick, the Mona Lisa, what are you going to do with that? You can't sell it. You

know, it's just one of those things.

It was that family up on the top floor.

They were ignored by Ian and Trevor on the day.

Nobody went with a wrench.

to those people up on the top floor.

And to be honest, they were ignored by us in the early days of the search.

And that is perhaps one of the most extraordinary things about this whole

story.

It got given to a pub landlord who run the Admiral Blake.

The landlord at the time was a chap called Ron.

He said, I just said to Ron, yeah, I'll tell you what, give this to one of your

kids, they can learn it. He said, just give us a couple of drinks.

I said, what?

He said, well, I just had a cut. He said he bought me a days worth of light out.

So this guitar ended up with Ron and I think one of his kids, Graham, ended up

with it.

It had gone to a pub landlord called Ron Guest.

We knew that it had then been passed on to his son, Graham, who unfortunately

had died in this terrible car crash.

But then we decided to look at... the other children, and I was able to

contact Elaine Guest, who was the youngest of the children, and talk to

her.

That's me on the roof of the two dogs, because the roof was our garden.

I mean, I grew up with Graham always having a bass.

I can't remember a time when it suddenly appeared.

It was always Graham's bass.

It was just always playing, you know.

And he didn't mind if I plopped myself down and listened to it.

And where was it kept here?

In the little bedroom.

You don't think he would have known it was Paul McCartney's?

Definitely not.

Definitely not.

I mean, when you think about it, who in their right minds would buy a bass and

know it was Paul McCartney's and then give it to his son?

Who's going to take God knows where and somebody's going to say, but that's Paul

McCartney's bass.

But no.

Do you wish you'd played it a bit now?

Now I know who it is, yes.

Were you into the Beatles?

No. No, no. I always thought the Beatles were like a girly band.

After Graham had died, her brother Hayden...

took the base from their family home.

Hayden got divorced in the 1990s and then married someone else and it ended

up in Hastings.

He left his wife and kids and then got involved with somebody and that's hence

why there's been no communication at all.

From what I can gather, the base was just in the loft in the house at

Hastings.

We were in Los Angeles, we were rehearsing, I think.

And I got a phone call from a colleague, said, somebody's turned up at the farm

with a bass, and they think it might be Paul's, this lost bass that everybody's

talking about all of a sudden, because it had been in the press by then.

And she'd left some photos and then took the bass back.

So I was emailed the photos.

And I just had a feeling. I could feel it. I just thought, ooh, this is really

interesting. And the next day, I was with Paul in the morning, and I had my

laptop, and we were about to leave for the studio. And I said, I've got

something I need to talk to you about. And he thought a second, but he said,

oh, is it bad? I said, no, it's not bad.

And I opened up my laptop, and I was shaking. I was literally shaking.

The minute I saw the case, it was in.

Whoa.

I've got it back.

Oh, my God.

And I'm checking it, and I'm thinking, well, yeah, that's it. And, you know,

that's how it looked, and this is definitely the case.

I remember carrying it in that case.

So I organised for somebody to go and pick it up.

And then I said, have you got it?

And he said, yep, it's here. I said, keep it. Don't let anybody... Just put

it away.

We've hardly let it out of us I'm

sitting

at home on my sofa Kathy's sitting over there and my mobile phone goes and this

voice comes on and say hey We've got the bass back. We've got the bass.

And I think, who's that? Who's this? Who are you? Then Penny dropped the accent,

the Liverpool accent, and I realised it was Paul McCartney.

We didn't quite know who to tell.

There were factors that meant we should keep it a secret for a bit longer till

we got our act together, till we absolutely had everyone verify that it

was mine, people like Nick.

So it was sweet to be able to ring him up and say, guess what?

It was stunning. You know, it was like, wow, what, really?

And I think I said to Paul, I think I'm going to go and get a beer out of the

fridge for this.

And he said, I would. He said, yeah. Is it a German beer like I used to drink in

Hamburg? It was just amazing because I could hear Paul on the phone to Nick and

it was just amazing.

That was incredible for us to just sit here thinking that Nick was in Germany,

Paul was in L.A., the bass was in Sussex, and we'd done it.

What happened for me over the last year, I've had two strokes, which has

certainly changed things for our life.

And the bass has certainly lightened that situation.

For us, I would say. Yeah, sure. Focus is the mind.

Paul McCartney's most treasured bass guitar that he had played throughout the

early days of the Beatles vanished without trace.

Now, 51 years later, it has been found.

James Dunham went to meet the mother of two who was unaware she was holding on

to an iconic instrument.

I was actually cataloguing lots of guitars that I've got and when I googled

it, it immediately came up.

I panicked and then went straight to his house because I knew he lived nearby and

I eventually found it after going through a lot of fields.

It had broken in the press that we were looking for this lost base, and that

might have been one of the reasons Kathy thought, I better give it back.

There's this little side life it's gone off and living with all these people I

don't know.

And it ends up with Kathy.

Just remember, this is Paul's bass. This is something he really, truly cares and

loves. And if you leave a guitar in a loft, it will destroy a guitar, you

know.

You've got to put it all together.

Put the strings on and then just play that first chord and just hope that you

got it right.

That's where the craftsmanship is, and Martin obviously is. An old-school

craftsman in the way he works, the way he does things.

These poor people, it means a lot to you, but it doesn't...

really sort of, I'm not that fussed about it.

I just think, obviously, it's just a guitar. And I, you know, now I get it. I

get it now, but I still don't get it, get it, really. You know, just thieve

it.

Thieving's nothing to be proud of, full stop.

But that said, we've all done it.

We've all done it. So, but it's the iconic guitar

that he had in his hands.

The implication, the size of it, its

meaning to obviously Paul McCartney and other people, the enormity of it all is

just a bit sort of blimey. Yeah, overwhelming.

Yeah, a little bit, yeah.

I don't want anyone to think of Dad anything but a nice

lad because that's what he was. He was a lovely, lovely lad.

But there wasn't always a receipt in the house for what we had.

It was just to make ends meet a little bit.

I don't blame him too much.

You know, I think it's just petty thievery.

It's the kind of thing we would have done a little bit of in Liverpool.

Just, you know, just it's there and I could nick it, so I will.

We got out of that pretty quickly Because luckily the Beatles took over

and we found an honest profession But I can sympathize with people who don't

have that kind of look So I don't blame him too much

I'm

not comfortable.

I'm not all right with it

You're taking the name Ormadad through muddy waters and that's not what you do.

Growing up anyway, I don't remember my dad ever telling me he loved me.

Not that that was a problem for me, it was just how it was.

When we had a little boy and I rang home,

he...

He never told me.

Mum told me.

But I later found out that he cried.

Which, Dad never did that.

Dad never cried. I never saw a tear out of my Dad's eye.

God, I can't remember, I think.

But apparently he cried, because to Dad it meant the name would never go.

Did you just see the one I sent you?

The one with the glue?

Have you seen that one yet?

No. Oh, I've just sent... Oh,

I've just sent you another one with Martin actually gluing the neck back on.

Oh, lovely. Is that Martin?

Yeah, say hi.

Hello, Paul.

Hi, Martin.

Your bass is saved.

I know. Thanks for doing this, man. It's great.

You're welcome.

I like his workshop.

Oh, yeah, lovely workshop. Well, look at his garden.

Oh, yeah, there you go.

How beautiful is that?

A little pond.

Beautiful. I can't wait to play it.

Yeah, it won't be long.

Have a good one, Paul. Thank you. Bye.

I feel that over the last 20 years or so...

Paul, to me, seems to appreciate more and more how good they were and how good

the songs were.

When he plays them, he really enjoys them. He thinks, this was a great song.

We really, really did well. And he's so proud of what they achieved.

So I think now him playing them on stage is big for him. I think he loves it.

He's come that full circle.

We can have a little break now.

Okay, cool. I've actually got something you might want to see. You've got

something for me. A little something you might want to see. Does the lead belong

to you?

Do you want to come this way?

Oh, here it is.

Look at that.

Look at that.

He's done a brilliant job as well, hasn't he?

Oh, yeah, I wanted to show you that.

That's a little note from Martin.

From Martin.

Many times I've had the pleasure of putting music back into old, broken

instruments.

It's been an absolute joy to do that with your bass.

So thanks, and I hope you like it.

Keep on trucking. Well, thank you, Martin.

You've done a great job. I love those kind of guys.

50 years ago since you last played that.

It's crazy. It's true, isn't it? Yeah.

It's over 50 years, yeah. That's crazy.

But I'd love to know what you were doing.

Maybe rehearsing for something. Yeah, and if the van had been parked. I don't

know, yeah. I know, it's a long time ago. Well, the van's parked and the guys

go in for a couple of pints and they decide they should leave the van and go

home and come back in tomorrow morning.

Oops. slight mistake big mistake so it gets nicked yeah and then ends up with

the local uh is that a bit short strap yeah it's kind of a

bigger rounder sound the solid i feel

yeah

wow

there she is yeah

Welcome home, honey.

Look at that.

Wow.

Crazy story.

Yeah. Yeah.

You've got to go a long way to find somebody that's grown up without the

Beatles.

And I think there's something about the relationship between us all, you know,

normal people and the Beatles, and you sort of think you know them because you

know the music.

Good to see force chasing as well.

The music went global.

But the bass, by going off on that weird route, the minute it went from that van

in Cambridge Gardens, it's gone into that ordinary British world.

It's gone missing here. It's ended up here, in ordinary streets, ordinary

pubs, ordinary families.

And there's something incredible about that in its own right.

I'm trying to be humble but you know I think I was an important jigsaw puzzle

piece because you know I guess if I hadn't been a beetle fan if I hadn't

have met Steve if I hadn't played the guitar these little things that fall

into place it might just been a different story we might never have

found it cheers to the old man absolute friends

We didn't get it back just for Paul. We got it back for everybody who was a

Beatles fan.

All the kids like me were little kids back then.

We're old farts now, you know.

They could see that face once more, you know.

I did take it.

Yeah.

It's much better. The logo is totally different. Yeah, but that's the old

logo. Oh, yeah, early logo.

Oh, yeah, right.

How's it feel?

It feels great.

Does it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, we've got to open the doors.

Hello. Oh, good to see you there.

My love, fantastic to see you. First time ever. Hello.

We meet at last.

Maybe he's going to play the bass. Who can tell?

So, a little tale to tell you here.

A while ago, I had a bass besides

this one.

My original bass.

And it got nicked, to tell you the truth.

And we've been looking for it for 50 years.

Well, I got it back.

And here to make its first stage appearance in 50 years is my original

bass.

Come on now.

Well, we'd love to see it in your hands if you're happy to grab it. I have it

right here.

There she is.

That's my old baby.

Do you find yourself getting a bit more reflective as you get older? Yeah, yeah,

I think so, yeah, definitely.

Because it's so special.

Now, I don't have an amp.

These are just four guys in Liverpool who didn't know each other.

I got introduced to John via a schoolmate of mine.

And yeah, I really liked him. It's lovely to play.

And then George I knew off the school bus.

Then John was looking for someone else to play guitar.

And I said, I've got this mate, you know, he's pretty good.

Yeah, you can get right up there and you wouldn't normally use that. I said to

George, go on, play it. He's looking at it.

So I encouraged George, so George got it out of the case and he plays a thing

called Raunchy, which is good and he did it great.

Then suddenly we had three of the Beatles then and it only needed Ringo to

show up for us to be complete.

JoJo was a man who thought he was a loner, but he knew it couldn't last.

JoJo left his home in Tucson, Arizona for some California grass.

Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.

Get back, JoJo.