This programme contains some strong language
Hey, guys. How's it going? OK. Right.
HUMMING: Do-do-do, do-do...
The Lost Bass! Yay!
It's a story. It is a story. You know, it's a quite a thing.
Yeah. And this being my first bass
that I'd got in Hamburg, um, 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.
# Oh, darling
# Please believe me
# I'll never do you no harm
# Believe me when I tell you
# I'll never do you no harm
# Oh, darling
CROWD CHEERS
# Please believe me
# I'll never make it alone
# Believe me when I beg you, ooh!
# Don't ever leave me alone
# When you told me
# You didn't need me any more
# Well, you know, I nearly broke down and cried
# When you told me
# You didn't need me any more
# Well, you know, I nearly fell down and died. #
Fantastic, isn't it? And as you see,
you can see what's been written in...
This was one of the main places where they used
to sit and write songs.
They'd sneak, bunk off school, come in here, eat some fried eggs.
There's a thing about fried eggs.
I don't know why. Everywhere... If you go to Hunter Davies' story,
they're all eating fried eggs.
It must have been just after the war.
They must have just loved fried eggs.
LAUGHTER
This is where we used to live.
Our humble abode in Forthlin Road, Allerton, Liverpool.
And this is where we used to live as a little family.
And, uh, there's people out there. What are they doing now?
That's why we left.
Lots of lovely memories.
Not enough of my mum and 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,
her little boys.
"Sh. Don't tell your dad. Sh."
See, whenever I talk about my mum,
it's always dangerous because this is where she went from.
This is our kid's little room.
Yeah, I stopped them going in there for many years,
because it was too important to me
and my 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. It's... 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.
PAUL: 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 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, uh, it turns round and the guitar
sort of sends it back to you and it comes back as a song somehow.
MUSIC: Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey by the Beatles
Well, it started in Hamburg.
# Ah, Kansas City
# Going to get my baby back home... #
You had gangsters, pimps.
You had prostitutes.
You had all you could imagine.
ARCHIVE: 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.
"Hallo, wie geht es?
"Guten Tag, sir."
HE LAUGHS
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 the bathtub.
Because they didn't have any mother or father to look after them.
It was a friendship. A friendship grew up, you know?
ANSWERPHONE SPEAKS GERMAN
Oh, danke schon. Hey, Klaus.
Paul here, and trying to reach you
so we can have a nice telephone conversation.
So I'll try again. Lots of love.
Bye-bye.
ANSWERPHONE BEEPS
Hmm.
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.
I'm a bass player, but now I can't
play any guitar chords without cramp,
this cramp...hand. I can't do a fist.
Can't do a fist, you know? It doesn't work.
Luckily enough, I can still hold my pencil.
I'm going to do drawings of the story of his bass.
I decided to start with the Top Ten.
That's the first time I actually saw the bass.
RECORDING: Well, it's... So what do you want to talk about?
We want to talk about you as the bass player, really.
So I've got... You've got Paul's guitar.
And next to it, Stuart Sutcliffe's guitar.
And... PAUL: My bass guitar
days go back to when Stuart was the bass player.
Stu had fallen in love with this girl called Astrid.
Stu decided he was going to stay in Hamburg,
and so that meant we didn't have a bass player,
and John and George said, "Well, I'm not doing it."
So that left me.
RECORDING: 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 Hofner.
I don't think it was very expensive, something like about £30.
Then once I got my own bass, then I was the bass player.
GUITAR STRUMS, INDISTINCT CHATTER
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 Preludin. 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 a bass.
"He's going to be the next bass player."
PRODUCER: It could have been your moment, Klaus.
You could have become Beatle number five.
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.
Suddenly they 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.
Looked cool.
ENGINE REVS
And their music then...
..you know, going to The Cavern...
..the difference was unbelievable.
It was like, "Whoa. How...? What happened?"
We knew we were going somewhere.
We always felt that we had something.
Then you've got John Lennon.
You know, he was a very witty cat.
With me, he 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.
# Some other guy now has taken my love away from me, oh now
# Some other guy now has taken away my sweet desire, oh now
# Some other guy now, I just don't want to hold my hand, oh now
# I'm the lonely one, as lonely as I can feel all right
# Some other guy... #
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, I got very used to it and loved it.
CHEERING
# Close your eyes and I'll kiss you
# Tomorrow, I'll miss you
# Remember I'll always be true. #
This Hofner bass really suited Paul's style of playing.
It's very rhythmical,
but at the same time it's very, very melodic.
# All my lovin' to you
# I'll pretend that I'm kissing
# The lips I am missing... #
ISOLATED BASS BOUNCES
You can hear in lots of songs that the songs are very,
very simple and the bass
does more movement than any other instrument.
# And I'll send all my lovin' to you... #
I'm a big fan of James Jamerson,
who was the Motown bass player.
Because normally bass is...
IMITATES PLODDING BASSLINE
But he was going... IMITATES MORE MELODIC BASSLINE
I was going, wow, that's a great way to use the bass.
# All my lovin'... #
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.
And it was a great feeling. I mean, I still remember it the moment -
bingo.
# I will send to you. #
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
MUSIC: Day Tripper by the Beatles
# Got a good reason... #
The 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 6 o'clock television news,
when 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've 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 straight away.
"My old Hofner" - he meant the '61 bass.
# And I found out... #
ENGINE REVS
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."
And of course, I had to say to him, 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.
It's still standing.
Poor old place.
And it was here, in these premises,
that they built the bass all those years ago.
That moment, that turn in history...
..you almost had to be there, really,
to feel the electricity in the air.
SOUND OF CHEERING
I was probably bored on a wet Wednesday,
I designed and put up the web page on the 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 #TraceTheBass
with the hashtag on the front.
Yes. I think it was you, was it? It was me.
Well, there you are - genius. It's catchy.
Very catchy. It's good. Genius, you see.
#TraceTheBass.
The whole of our marriage, you know, for the last 20-odd years,
Cathy's just supported me with one lunatic scheme after another,
you know? And she used to be a bank manager, you see,
so she's good at filing stuff.
We talked about it endlessly. Endlessly. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't think there was one purpose in searching for the bass.
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.
# She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah... #
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 Kop.
And very emotional sound.
# Pride can hurt you, too Apologise... #
Among the many things I memorised 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 you know you should be glad... #
Ooh!
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?
# Be glad Ooh!
# She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
# She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah... #
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.
It was a very rich period -
for music, for us,
particularly for making records.
# Yeah, yeah, yeah
# Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. #
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 basses 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 up
and 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.
# I read the news today Oh, boy
# About a lucky man who made the grade
# And though the news was rather sad... #
Meanwhile, the '61 bass is away being repaired.
# But I just had to look... #
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 resprayed 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.
RISING DISCORDANT STRINGS
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 cup
# 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... #
Coming from a look point of view, I think the '63 is nicer.
Maybe even better. Better pickups,
better sound, louder. Whatever.
He's very singular. He 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.
At Shea Stadium, if you look really careful,
you see Ringo up on the drum riser.
Just down below Ringo on the back of the amp, there's the bass.
You have to look very eagle eyed, but 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.
# Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona... #
The only time you see it again,
you have to wait till a quick shot of it
by the coffee table in 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 once
# 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, it's
from the end of the Beatles, nobody had ever seen this bass.
It just wasn't there any more.
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 -
as green as a cabbage as well.
RISING DISCORDANT STRINGS
It had got to the point where it needed somebody
better than me to start poking about.
FINAL SUSTAINED PIANO CHORD
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?"
And 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 work together.
And we convinced ourselves
that we may not find the bass,
but we'd find stories about the bass.
We'd find what the bass 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 to introduce myself,
thinking he was German and being conscious of the sort 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,
"Scott, well, look, I've got a lot of emails,"
and I passed him the lot over for him to read
and get a sense of what we were dealing with then.
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, it was wrong.
"A man claiming he had one of Paul's guitars walked into
"a pawn shop in Las Vegas called the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop
"to sell it. There's a television programme 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 bass.
So it's a treasure hunt.
But also people love the Beatles
and love Paul McCartney and wanted to help.
THEY PLAY DAY TRIPPER
# She's a big teaser
# She took me half the way there... #
I've always admired Paul McCartney as a bass player.
He made the bass guitar cool.
Beatle fans know that the bass disappeared
and no-one knows where it's gone.
So, um, it'd be amazing if somebody ever did find it.
Because that's history, isn't it? It's history.
# Day tripper
# Day tripper, yeah... #
Yeah. Ever since I can remember I've been a Beatles fan.
There'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 want to have a moustache,"
you know?
HE LAUGHS
So I bought it second-hand. Only paid £80 for it,
which is not much more than Paul paid for his, probably.
Can you play anything on it?
A little bit of Day Tripper but...
APPROXIMATION OF BASSLINE
Only a little bit!
I need a plectrum.
HE LAUGHS
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.
It's a Vox.
The 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!
NOTE RINGS OUT
It works.
HE PLAYS DAY TRIPPER
That's it.
Got there in the end. Yeah.
Practice makes perfect, doesn't it?
HE LAUGHS
# One-way ticket, yeah
# It took me so long to find out
# And I found out... #
RIFF BLARES
School drop-off time, innit?
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.
Known him for two, three years,
so we always have a good laugh when we're crewing up together.
You know, 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 on to the Hofner website, saw that Nick Wass was looking for it.
And that was like the, yeah, the Holy Grail for me.
It was, you know, like finding the Bible,
trying to find Paul McCartney's bass.
You know, if you're a fan, that's like, wow.
Well, I was with Steve one day and 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."
You know.
And I said, "You're joking, aren't you?" You know.
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, "Well, it don't matter 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 told me this bullshit story about having
a client in the back of the ambulance, as they described it...
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 bass had been stolen.
And that it had been given to a guy
in a pub up at Ladbroke Grove, London.
And I thought, "Yeah, a bit more bullshit."
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 bass."
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.
They said 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 bass 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,
it is distinctive and it should be identifiable.
CONTINUES FAINTLY: Yeah. But, of course, it may have been destroyed
somewhere along the line. It may have just been chucked 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.
Um, it was put away,
presumably, after they finished filming Get Back.
And after that, nobody has any clear idea of
what happened.
Where it was actually stored...
It might be there. We're just not clear about...
Well, I really wish you luck on your search,
because I think it's a wonderful story, Nick.
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.
Le Monde... Der Spiegel in Germany.
Yeah. And 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. Yeah!
TV CHATTER PLAYS
We thought that we'd almost plugged into
that spirit of the Beatles. Yeah.
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 Oh, boy
# About a lucky man who made the grade... #
When we read Ian Horne's email,
we knew instantly that we had to speak to Ian.
# I just had to laugh... #
And Ian's lead was the only lead that said,
"I know Paul McCartney." Yeah.
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'd 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 them again.
It was depressing.
And 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, um, forming Wings.
I knew that, if I kept playing Beatles songs,
which I knew people wanted,
then I would become a Beatles tribute band.
I thought, maybe that's not the greatest look.
He was experimenting with things he hadn't done before.
He had a Yamaha bass, a Fender bass.
LAUGHS: So he went through all the basses people are playing, you know.
# And all the people
# Say that people must be free
# But meanwhile
# Back in Ireland
# There's a man who looks like me... #
We went on the road. Boy, did we go on the road.
Tell us about it. I mean, well, cos 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 busk the whole thing.
So we had a tranny and we just headed off up the motorway.
We had the kids, a couple of dogs, a whole group.
All our instruments. Oh, there was, there was a U-Haul
following behind with 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.
THEY LAUGH
One of the lads - Ian Horne, actually- went in.
"I've got Paul McCartney out in the van,
"do you want him on lunchtime tomorrow?"
"Really?" They come out in the van to sort of check.
"Oh, yeah. Yeah, we'll have him."
# Give Ireland back to the Irish
# Make Ireland Irish today... #
All right, Henry.
GUITAR SOLO
He was loving it, being back in the saddle.
And he never played the Hofner, as far as I know. It was around.
Still lugging it around from place to place?
Yeah, but maybe that's more me than him.
Me thinking, "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. We didn't leave till 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 Hofner bass, acoustic guitars, some amplifiers.
I couldn't park at Trevor's because opposite
Trevor's house was a school,
so it was restricted parking.
Just went up the road a bit, turned right
and there's a T-junction there,
which is Cambridge Gardens.
There's a parking place right on the edge, so I thought,
I'll 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."
You know, a cold sweat.
So I throw the roller door up...
..and immediately notice there's stuff missing, you know?
Uh, which was 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's there and it's 100 Cambridge Gardens.
At the time, it seemed kosher.
But all these hippies and people that lived around
Lancaster Road and Cambridge Gardens
in these squat houses.
There were a lot of musicians.
You know, obviously, thieves amongst them.
And...Trevor thought it was this guy Dik Mik, who 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 worked 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 this thing there.
So we went in there, quite threatening behaviour.
Dik Mik was still in bed but 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 and the Hofner bass has been stolen
"and a few other things."
And I sort of took a deep breath and stood there thinking,
"Well, what's going to come back at me?"
And he was absolutely amazing. He just turned round and he said,
"It's all right, Ian, I've got another one."
I had a feeling in me - did he think I've done it?
So we 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's going to tell us to fuck off.
HE LAUGHS
Probably an hour passed,
standing around in 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 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, happy to chat about it.
He posed for pictures for the photographer,
and I think we probably spoke for maybe four or five minutes.
Um, and at that stage,
our presence has 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 bass,
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 it?
You know, he's been a few places and around,
so it may 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 it, to 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 Hofner was a Beatle bass, and he wasn't a Beatle any more.
And 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 bass had gone into 100 Cambridge Gardens.
So we were interested to find out more about this character,
Dik Mik, that at that time
certainly Trevor suspected and Ian did as well.
Dik Mik was a roadie and he'd been a weed dealer.
And 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.
That's a good girl.
Trevor and Ian, they were both very good friends of mine.
It 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 Gardens."
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...
Dik Mik - who was Dik Mik?
Dik Mik was one of the people in the original Hawkwind.
Dik Mik 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,
and somebody could have said, "Oh, whose van's that?"
"Oh, it's Wings' van," you know.
I heard reports of Hawkwind'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 veg stalls.
But a lot of thugs showed up on Portobello Road,
and that's when things started to go downhill. You know,
rougher and 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 bass 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 bedsheets
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...
It does feel very vulnerable. ..that desperately needs saving. Yeah.
But then a penny dropped.
I thought, "Ah." I got an email about six months
before this from a guy talking about the bass being stolen
in Ladbroke 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 him and said,
look, you know, something's occurred.
We didn't tell them what, but that 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.
It'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. No, I didn't fancy it.
VOICE-OVER: I got back to Steven's and said,
"This Nick, he's emailed me again."
Next time. Yeah.
I think, uh, you know, it's your story to tell,
do you want to, um, 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.
And there was a pub, um,
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 place, 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 who was doing what around the area and stuff like that.
And there was racketeering going on and people going around.
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 at the pub - someone will have it off you.
Someone, you know, 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 and everywhere, you know.
So it got to a stage where, when I was looking at the rota,
I was like, "Oh, no, I'm working with him again.
"I know what's coming here."
HE PLAYS SNIPPET OF DAY TRIPPER
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'd 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 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, "Andy, I don't know. I wasn't there,
"so I have 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 find it?" I said, "No.
"No," I said, "I don't think we can
"go and get a boat and go and find it."
I think Andrew...replied to me, saying
he would ask his partner. And it's then I get an email from Steve.
NAOMI: 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.
SCOTT: 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 bass is.
But sadly, it's at the bottom of that canal
and probably gone forever.
Three, four.
# My... #
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, "You're kidding." It 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.
# My brave face... #
We got off to a flying start, you know.
# Unaccustomed as I am... #
And we just recorded with two guitars and vocals
and it was good fun.
# ..didn't hit back
# I've been doin' the rounds... #
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 that I...
But I never felt like I could hear the voice.
LAUGHS: # Tell anybody when I'm gonna get back... #
Because this bass was just too...
It was too big sounding.
At some point I asked 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 sort of modern instruments.
But he said, "Oh, but 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, he,
things changed for Paul.
# Ever since you left I have been trying to compose
# A "Baby, will you please come home?" note meant for you... #
And it recorded great.
It's got a lovely tone for a little, little bass.
# My brave, my brave, my brave face... #
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...like somebody singing, you know?
# Face. #
CHEERING
Elvis Costello suggested bringing out the '63.
Maybe that kind of like, he 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 to '89, '90, when we were about to embark on 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 Beatles.
They're going to want some big, big moments.
# Close your eyes and I'll kiss you... #
CHEERING
# Tomorrow, I'll miss you
# Remember, I'll always be true
# And then while I'm away
# I'll write home every day
# And I'll send all my loving to you... #
SONG CONTINUES FAINTLY
Paul's quite nostalgic about things.
They're important to him.
Not maybe in a collectable way,
but just emotionally
and they're part of his history and they're part of his life.
And he... 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?
SCOTT: Very often in investigations, there's a breakthrough moment
where you're effectively given something on a plate.
NAOMI: Who's Steven? 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.
We was on holiday in Spain and my phone went.
"Is that Steve Glenister?" "Yeah."
"It's Nick Wass from The Lost Bass."
I said, "Oh, right, hi. You all right?"
He said, "Um...
"..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 and that.
So we was coming home one day
and I had the radio on in the car.
How old do you think you are at this point?
I may have just had the kids, so mid 20s, something like that.
This song come on. I just said,
"Oh, it's The Beatles. I like these."
And it was... I done it more.
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, um...
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 the guitar."
He said, "I just opened this van up."
He said, "When I realised what it was, I thought, "Oh...
"..you know, it's Paul McCartney's.
"It's the obvious shape - that proper-shaped guitar."
I can just imagine, bless him, his face. "Ugh."
You've nicked 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.
To be honest, they were ignored by us... And 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, here you are, 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, "Well..." He said, "Well," he said...
He said, "He bought me a day's worth of light ales."
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 talked to her.
That's me on the roof with 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.
He was just always playing.
You know, and he didn't mind
if I plonked myself down and listened to it.
Where was it kept here?
Um, 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 knowing it was
Paul McCartney's and then give it to your son, who's going to take it
God knows where and somebody's going to say,
"That's Paul McCartney's bass!"
But, no.
Do you wish you'd played it a bit now?
Now I know whose it is, yes!
Were you into The Beatles? No. No, no.
I always thought The Beatles were like a girlie band.
After Graham had died,
her brother Haydn took the bass from their family home.
Haydn got divorced in the 1990s
and then married someone else, and then 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 bass was just in the loft in the house at Hastings.
We were in Los Angeles. We were rehearsing, I think.
# Oh, yeah... #
And, um, 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." Cos 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, 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 it was something bad.
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, you know...
HE GASPS
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.
And 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...
"Don't... Just put it away."
# And in the end, the love you take... #
LAUGHS: We've hardly let it out of our sight!
# Is equal to the love
# You make... #
And I'm sitting at home on my sofa.
Cathy's sitting over there and my mobile phone goes.
And this voice comes on and says,
"Hey, we've got the bass back. We've got the bass."
And I'm thinking, "Who's that? Who's this? Who are you?"
Then the penny dropped - the accent, the Liverpool accent,
and I realised it was Paul McCartney.
Well, we didn't quite know who to tell. Um...
There were factors that meant we should keep it a secret
for a bit longer till we got our act together.
Till we've absolutely had everyone verify that it was mine -
people like Nick. Um...
..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 cos 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 LA,
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 - focuses the mind.
BIRDSONG
SOPHIE RAWORTH: 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, uh,
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 bass.
And that might have been one of the reasons Cathy thought,
"I'd 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... And it ends up with Cathy.
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've 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 that it means a lot to you,
but it doesn't really sort of...
I'm not that fussed about it.
I just think, "Get over yourself. It's just a guitar."
And I, you know, now I get it, I get I get it now,
but I still don't GET IT get it, really. You know, just leave 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, phew, blimey.
Overwhelming? Yeah. A little bit, yeah.
I don't want... I don't want anyone
to think of Dad anything but a nice lad,
because that's what he was. He was a... 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. Um, we got out of that pretty quickly.
Because, luckily, the Beatles took over
and we found an honest profession.
But I can sympathise with people who don't have that kind of luck.
So I don't blame him too much.
I'm not comfortable.
I'm not all right with it.
You're sort of... You're taking the name of my dad 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, uh...
He never told me.
Mum told me. But, um...
..I later found out that he cried.
Which Dad never did that. Dad never...
I never saw... I never saw a tear out of my dad's eye.
God, I can't remember, I think...
But apparently he cried cos, like, 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... I'm watching the dowels going in.
Oh, I've just sent you another one
with Martin actually glueing the neck back on.
Oh, lovely. Is that Martin? Yep. Say hi.
Hello, Paul. Hi, Martin!
Your bass is saved.
Yeah, I know. Thanks for doing this, man. It's great.
You're welcome.
I like his workshop as well.
Oh, yes. Lovely workshop.
Well, look at his garden.
Oh, yeah, that's... There you go.
How beautiful is that? Yeah.
Little pond. Beautiful.
Yeah. I can't wait to play it.
Yeah, it won't be long.
Have a good one, Paul. Thank you. Bye.
I feel like, 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
and he thinks, this was a great song and we really,
really did well, and he's so proud of what they achieved.
So I think now him playing them onstage is big for him.
I think he loves it.
He's come that full circle.
SOULFUL SONG PLAYS
We could have a little breakdown.
OK, 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 that
I believe belonged to you.
If you want to come this way.
Whoa! Here it is.
THEY LAUGH
Look at that. Look at that.
He's done a brilliant job, hasn't he?
Oh... Oh, yeah, I wanted to show you that.
That's a little note from Martin. It's 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.
Yeah. I love those kind of guys.
PLAYS AMPLIFIED
50 years ago since you last played that.
HE CHUCKLES
That's crazy, isn't it? 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. Hmm.
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 and then ends up with the local, uh...
Is that a bit short, the strap?
Yeah. It's kind of a bigger rounder sound, I feel.
HE PLAYS DAY TRIPPER BASSLINE
LAUGHS
Yeah.
Wow.
There she is. Yeah.
Welcome home, honey.
Look at that. Wow.
Crazy story. Yeah. Yeah.
INDISTINCT
SCOTT: 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 Floss chasing as well.
VOICE-OVER: 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.
BIRDS CAW
Dad used to say something to me.
I was only about four or five, I think. But he used to pick us up,
pick me up and I used to sit on the bar.
VOICE-OVER: 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 Beatle fan,
if I hadn't have met Steve...
..if I hadn't have played the guitar,
these little things that fall into place,
it might have just been a different story.
We might never have found it.
There you go, mate - for your dad.
Cheers. To the old man. Absent friends. Yeah.
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.
We were little kids back then and we're old farts now, you know.
They could see that bass once more, you know?
BASS PLAYS
I did take it down a bit. Yeah.
It's much better. The logo is totally different.
Yeah, but that's the old logo.
Oh, yeah! Early logo. Yeah, right.
How's it feel?
It feels great. Does it?
THEY LAUGH
Come on, we can go and open the doors.
HE LAUGHS
LAUGHS: Hello!
Always. Oh, good to see you, Nick. 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?
CHEERING
So, a little tale to tell you here.
Um...
A while ago, I had a bass besides this one.
My original bass.
And, uh, it got nicked, tell you the truth.
And we've been looking for it for 50 years.
Well, uh...
..I got it back.
And here to make its first stage appearance
in 50 years is my original bass.
CHEERING
Get Back. All right! Are you ready? Yeah!
Come on then.
# 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... #
Well, we'd love to see it in your hands, if you're happy to grab it.
I have it right here.
HE CHUCKLES
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.
Um...because it's so special.
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.
And John was looking for someone else to play guitar.
And I said, "I've got this mate, you know, who's pretty good."
Yeah, you can get right up there and you wouldn't normally use them.
I said to George, "Go on, play it." He's looking at me.
So I encouraged George. 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 to where you once belonged
# Get back
to where you once belonged
# Get back, Jojo
# Go home! #