Ian Horne can vividly recall the moment he realized he had lost Paul McCartney’s Höfner 500/1 violin bass.
“It felt like the worst moment of my life,” Horne tells RadioTimes of the morning in October 1972 when he discovered the instrument missing. “I walked up to the truck, saw the padlock on the ground, and my heart sank.”
This was no ordinary bass. It was the instrument with which the Beatles became famous in 1962 and ’63, heard on early hits like “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You.” McCartney was just 18 when he purchased it for £30 in Hamburg in April 1961 during the band’s residency on the Reeperbahn.
Within two years, the bass had been worn down from constant use, prompting McCartney to purchase a second Höfner as a replacement. The original instrument was largely retired, surfacing only occasionally, most notably during the filming of Let It Be.
By 1972, the Beatles had been broken up for two years, and McCartney and his wife, Linda, were recording and performing with their new band, Wings. Horne had joined them the previous year as their sound engineer. At the time, Wings were bouncing between London studios while recording tracks for their second album, Red Rose Speedway.
At the end of one long studio session, Horne loaded the band’s equipment into their truck.
“It was a three-ton truck with a roller shutter at the back,” he recalls.
Afterward, he drove Wings crew member Trevor Jones to his flat in Notting Hill, in West London. It was late, and Jones suggested Horne stay the night. In what would turn out to be the worst decision of his career, Horne agreed. He parked the truck nearby on Cambridge Gardens, in what he describes as a rough neighborhood of drug dealers and artists.
“There were lots of nice people in the hippie culture,” he says. “But there were some dodgy people about as well.”
The next morning, Horne returned to the truck and immediately saw something was wrong. The padlock that secured the roller shutter was lying on the ground.
“When I pushed the shutter up, I saw straight away that it was gone,” he says. “The bass wasn’t there.”
Jones led Horne to several nearby houses where he suspected the instrument might have ended up. Armed with tools from the truck, the two men knocked on doors and confronted a few residents.
“We went to two or three places in a sort of threatening manner,” Horne recalls. “But we didn’t find it.”
I realized I had to go and tell Paul in person. I expected him to go ballistic.”
— Ian Horne
There was nothing left to do but report the theft to the police — and then deliver the news to McCartney himself.
“I realized I had to go and tell Paul in person.”
At the time, McCartney was living near Abbey Road Studios. Horne, clearly shaken, went to see him and broke the news directly.
“I just came out with it: ‘I’ve got some bad news, Paul. Our truck was broken into and the bass was stolen.’”
Horne braced for the worst.
“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.’”
In fact, McCartney was so concerned about Horne’s reputation that he chose not to publicize the loss, fearing it might damage the engineer’s career. The decision had an unintended consequence: with little attention drawn to the theft, the bass quietly disappeared into obscurity.
Which helps explain why it took decades for the search to begin in earnest. In 2023, the Lost Bass Project launched a global search to find the Höfner. Within weeks, a woman discovered the instrument was among the guitars her husband left behind when he died during the COVID outbreak. That search is the subject of the new documentary Paul McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass.
So why did McCartney finally decide to look for it in 2023?
“I think anything that’s nicked, you want back — especially if it has sentimental value,” he said. “It just went off into the universe, and it left us thinking, ‘Where did it go?’ There must be an answer.”
