LONDON – No one seemed to know what happened to one of the most important bass guitars in music history, though in the decades since it went missing, there had been some dramatic rumours.

Was the Höfner violin bass, which had accompanied Paul McCartney and the Beatles to worldwide fame, tucked away in a private collection? Had it been secretly shipped to a wealthy fan in Japan?

It turned out the bass was passing time in a more unassuming locale: the loft of a family home in East Sussex, England. The family reported the guitar in late September 2023 after a couple of journalists and a guitar expert started a new campaign to look for it, more than 50 years after it was last seen.

The guitar, which has been authenticated by its manufacturer, has been returned to McCartney, according to a statement posted on his website on Feb 15. “Paul is incredibly grateful to all those involved,” it said.

It was the denouement to an enduring mystery that had gripped Beatles fans, including one group who pooled their skills to help find it.

‘It started Beatlemania’

The Höfner 500/1 guitar is a precious part of Beatles lore. It can be heard on recordings of hit songs including Love Me Do, She Loves You and Twist and Shout.

After becoming the band’s bassist, McCartney desperately needed a bass guitar and bought the instrument in a music store in Hamburg, Germany, in 1961.

“I got my Violin Bass at the Steinway shop in the town centre,” he recalled in a 1993 interview with Guitar Magazine. It cost the equivalent of £30 (S$50) – cheap enough for him to afford. “And once I bought it, I fell in love with it,” he said. “For a light, dinky little bass, it has a very rich sound.”

As the Fab Four found a whirlwind of fame, McCartney played the Höfner through hundreds of gigs, including early concerts at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England, where the Beatles met their future manager, Brian Epstein, and for the recordings of the band’s first two albums.

One of the last sightings of the bass was in London in 1969, in footage of the band writing their album Let It Be. Sometime after that, it disappeared.

Efforts to locate the bass had stalled until September 2023, when the journalists and Höfner expert appealed to the public for tips.

“It’s an iconic instrument,” said Mr Nick Wass, a semi-retired consultant for Höfner who has worked with McCartney. “It started Beatlemania.”

Among the hundreds of responses they received were some promising clues, said Mr Scott Jones, a journalist who worked on the project with his wife Naomi Jones.

A sound engineer who had worked with McCartney remembered the guitar had been left in the back of a van in 1972 and that thieves had then broken in.

Another tip, Mr Jones said, suggested the guitar had been stolen in the neighbourhood and sold for a small sum of money and “some free beer” to Mr Ronald Guest, the landlord of a local pub.

Then, in late September, the landlord’s family, living in the town of Hastings in south-east England, reached out to McCartney’s studio: Could the guitar in their loft be the missing bass?

‘It’s hardly travelled any distance at all’

“We thought this bass would have gone off on a more glitzy journey,” said Mr Jones, adding that, in fact, the research indicated that the guitar had stayed in the same family. “In all of those years, it’s hardly travelled any distance at all.”

Mr Jones said a member of the Guest family handed the guitar to McCartney’s studio in Sussex.

Posts on social media appeared to show Mr Ruaidhri Guest, 21, holding the guitar. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he said in a post on Feb 16 that the family would be releasing details “in due course”.

Soon after the guitar emerged, Mr Wass drove from Germany to England to help authenticate that it was, in fact, that Höfner.

“There it was in my hands,” Mr Wass said, adding that he had been looking for the guitar since McCartney inquired about it several years ago. Finding it, he said, felt “thrilling”.

“It didn’t take me more than 10 seconds to know it was the right one,” he said, as he pointed to the left-handed guitar’s distinctive parts and colour.

The guitar had sustained some damage, he said, including a cracked neck, and would need to be repaired.

Its discovery stunned even its searchers, who said they were hopeful but realistic about their prospects as they pieced together the clues from archival clippings and tips. “We never assumed that we’d find it,” Mr Jones said. “If we had to be honest, the chances were probably very, very slim.”

Other famous lost instruments have also been unearthed: A Gibson acoustic guitar belonging to John Lennon that had been lost for decades turned up and was sold for US$2.4 million (S$3.2 million) to an anonymous buyer in 2015.

Despite the odds, the team said they were driven by a determination to preserve a piece of Beatles mythology.

“All the Beatles fans everywhere can see this bass again,” said Mr Wass. “I’m hoping Paul McCartney, when he gets it back, will play it for us all.” NYTIMES