“It just went off into the universe and it left us thinking, where did it go?” The hunt for Paul McCartney’s stolen Höfner bass was one of music’s biggest mysteries – and now they are making a documentary about it

The search for Paul McCartney’s missing Höfner 500/1 bass guitar is to be told in a new documentary.

Titled, The Beatle And The Bass, the film unpacks all the drama behind the search for McCartney’s ‘Violin’ bass, which went missing in 1972, reportedly stolen out of the back of a van in London (some reports say Ladbroke Grove, others Notting Hill) and was subsequently the subject of a global hunt led by investigative journalists Scott and Naomi Jones.

Spoilers ahead: we know how this movie ends, or at least, how the search for the bass went.

The Lost Bass Project was successful. It located the stolen Höfner in September 2023. McCartney was reunited with it in February 2024. And in December 2024 it made a dramatic return to the stage for the climax of Macca’s triumphant Got Back 2024 Tour at London’s 02 Arena, with McCartney welcoming Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood to the stage to perform Get Back.

It was the first time in over 50 years that he had played it in anger.

McCartney completed a historic night by bringing fellow Beatle Ringo Starr onstage to sit in with him on drums for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Helter Skelter.

As reported by Variety, The Beatle And The Bass has been commissioned by BBC Arts and will be produced by Passion Pictures, the company behind the award-winning Christopher Reeve documentary, Super/Man. McCartney will play a starring role.

“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…”

McCartney got his answer when the bass turned up in the attic of someone’s house in Suffolk, England. But some answers only invite more questions. How did it get there? What has it been doing all of this time?

We do know where this story started. McCartney got this bass right at the beginning of the Beatles, when they’d swapped Liverpool for Hamburg and were cutting their teeth playing clubs night after night. McCartney went gear shopping and it caught his eye.

“I found a nice little shop in the centre of Hamburg, near a big department store called Karstadt,” said McCartney, speaking with Tony Bacon in 1994. “And I saw this bass in the window, this violin-shaped Höfner. It was a good price, because my dad had always said I shouldn’t do the never-never [buy on credit], but we were earning reasonable money. I liked the Höfner’s lightness, too. So I bought it, and I think it was only about 30 quid.”

Paul McCartney with Ringo Starr and Ronnie Wood, The O2, London, 19 December 2024 - YouTube

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Having found McCartney’s Höfner, The Lost Bass Project has turned its attention to another of guitar’s great mysteries, the whereabouts of the Gibson ES-345 that Michael J Fox as Marty McFly played during Back To The Future.

The Joneses have officially been put on the case as Gibson’s global hunt for one of the most iconic electric guitars in pop culture continues. It is still missing, but Gibson CEO and president Cesar Gueikian teased a Custom Shop replica release of the McFly ES-345, which appears to be anachronistically badged as a “1955” model. Cute. Accurate to the movie, not to the model’s history.

That hunt, too, will surely be a documentary in the making – if they can find it. But then the best mysteries are those we can't solve. Come to think of it: has anyone seen Eric Clapton's 'Beano' Les Paul?