{"id":514068,"date":"2026-04-05T10:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T10:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/514068\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T10:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T10:50:08","slug":"how-i-nearly-joined-the-beatles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/514068\/","title":{"rendered":"How I nearly joined the Beatles"},"content":{"rendered":"

He proved the inspiration for the Beatles<\/a>\u2019 mop tops and won a Grammy for designing their Revolver album cover, but on a balmy summer Saturday morning in 1961, Klaus Voormann nearly became the Fifth Beatle.<\/p>\n

Their original bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, had just played his last gig in Hamburg\u2019s Top Ten Club, opting to leave the pre-fame band and remain in Germany with his girlfriend, photographer Astrid Kirchherr<\/a>, to become an artist. In a chemically altered haze, and already part of the inner circle of Paul McCartney and company, Voormann thought there might be a vacancy and staked his claim.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, it\u2019s a silly story, because the band then was not important,\u201d Voormann laughs today. \u201cNobody knew who those boys were. But I thought they were great and would have loved to play with them. We were all outside and sat on a heap of wood, and we were all a little stoned. Just for fun, I said, \u2018Well, maybe I could play.\u2019 And then John Lennon replied: \u2018Ah, Paul\u2019s already bought a bass.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Days earlier, McCartney had purchased the German-made violin-shaped H\u00f6fner 500\/1 for \u00a330 (around \u00a3600 today), which he played on the Beatles\u2019 early hits, including Love Me Do and She Loves You. However, in 1972, the instrument mysteriously vanished<\/a> \u2013 purloined from the back of a van in the Notting Hill area of London. Now, a charming documentary, McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass, unpacks the twist-filled 51-year quest to reunite Macca with the \u201cHoly Grail of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll\u201d (as his H\u00f6fner has been dubbed).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He proved the inspiration for the Beatles\u2019 mop tops and won a Grammy for designing their Revolver album…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[179701,5343,168438,96,8793,128,6470,2820,11654,5438,3133,167224,10447,58919,56,54,55,157732],"class_list":{"0":"post-514068","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-20th-century-history","9":"tag-culture","10":"tag-culture-editors-choice","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-hamburg","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-paul-mccartney","15":"tag-pop-music","16":"tag-rock-music","17":"tag-standard","18":"tag-television","19":"tag-television-editors-choice","20":"tag-the-beatles","21":"tag-top-story","22":"tag-uk","23":"tag-united-kingdom","24":"tag-unitedkingdom","25":"tag-us-content"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}