Credit: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi / Bradford Timeline
October 20th, 2026 · 7:45pm BST
Paul McCartney has spent six decades collecting accolades the way most of us collect loose change.
As a member of The Beatles, he is credited with having revolutionised popular music. He has written or co-written a record 32 songs that topped the Billboard Hot 100. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has inducted him twice. His mantelpiece also holds an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy and 19 Grammys. He was appointed an MBE in 1965, and in 1997, he was knighted. On top of it all, McCartney is incredibly financially savvy. He is, in fact, the only musician in the history of the United Kingdom to reach the status of billionaire.
In June 1961, though, a 19-year-old Paul McCartney couldn’t even afford a bass of his own.
The Beatles’ original bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, who left the group to pursue painting, briefly lent his bass to McCartney. However, Sutcliffe specifically asked the left-handed McCartney not to restring the instrument; as such, he was forced to play the bass upside down.
McCartney was drawn to the model: the Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass. But Höfner did not sell a left-handed version of the 500/1 at the time. So, the ‘Hey Jude’ singer had to save up for a custom-built model. Later in 1961, McCartney placed the order for the tailor-made bass at the Steinway Musikhaus in Hamburg. The instrument cost him about £30, the equivalent of £340 today. For an electric bass, this appears to be pretty standard, even verging on cheap: at Wunjo Guitars on London’s Denmark Street, for example, the cheapest electric bass available is £339.
McCartney recalled, “I couldn’t afford a Fender. Fenders even then seemed to be about £100. All I could really afford was about £30… so for about £30, I found this Höfner violin bass. And to me, it seemed like, because I was left-handed, it looked less daft because it was symmetrical. Didn’t look as bad as a cutaway which was the wrong way. So I got into that.”
The instrument accompanied him throughout his fabled Beatles tenure, becoming battered from use. It is now valued at over $10million. Indeed, the bass has lived quite a life. It was stolen out of the back of a van in Notting Hill in October 1972, and its whereabouts remained a mystery for decades; it was only found in late 2023.
Further reading: From The Vault
Fans banded together to create The Lost Bass Project. After years of chasing potential leads, the group eventually connected with ‘someone living in a terraced house on the south coast of England’ who realised that the bass that had been gathering dust in their attic for years was, in fact, the 1961 Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass. The instrument was returned to McCartney.
The search is the subject of a documentary, McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass, which was screened in UK cinemas on April 2nd and 4th, 2026. As for the guitar? It was last seen onstage for the first time in decades in December 2024, at the end of McCartney’s Got Back tour at The O2 in London.
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