Hawkwind founder and bandleader Dave Brock has responded to the negative portrayal of his band in the recent BBC documentary Paul McCartney: The Hunt For The Lost Bass with anger and dismay, saying, “I was pissed off. This disrespects the band.”
First aired on BBC Two on April 11, the documentary looked into how McCartney’s first bass guitar – a Höfner 500/1 violin bass, which he’d bought in Hamburg during the Beatles’ residency there in 1961 – went missing.
The bass was used on the albums Please Please Me and With The Beatles, then replaced in 1963 by a newer model gifted by Höfner. McCartney’s original became a battered backup instrument until the Beatles split and was still in his possession when he went solo and formed his next group, Wings.
Article continues belowIn October 1972, when Wings were recording their second LP Red Rose Speedway, the bass was part of a haul stolen from the back of their van, which had been parked overnight in Cambridge Gardens, Ladbroke Grove. In an unexpected plot twist, The Hunt For The Lost Bass names local residents Hawkwind as potential culprits, particularly Michael "DikMik" Davies, their late roadie-turned-electronics pioneer.
Dave Brock had settled in for a night in front of the TV to watch the doc. He was shocked to see Hawkwind dragged into the story. “I’d read about the film in the Radio Times," he tells Classic Rock, “It mentioned the counterculture scene in west London but I didn’t realise we were going to be in it.”
In the documentary, Wings roadie Ian Horne explains how, while transferring their gear to Basing Street Studios in Notting Hill, he decided not to unpack the backline at the end of a day but instead parked the van in a spot suggested by his friend Trevor. The next morning the lock was broken on the back shutter, and the gear gone.
The area back then was a post-war slum populated by squat-dwellers, working-class families, hippie creatives – and bands such as Hawkwind. DikMik’s basement flat was beside where the van was parked. Horne says, “Trevor thought DikMik was a bit iffy,” but is unable to back this up before elaborating, “I did feel it was one of that mob because they all knew we worked for Paul.” Horne then recounts that he and Trevor, armed with wrenches, forced entry to the flat where they found an alarmed DikMik but saw no sign of the bass, or any of Wings’ other gear.
“But did they?” Brock says. “That sounds to me like a tall story. We toured a hell of a lot in 1972 and might not have been in London at that time. And if two guys with wrenches had burst into DikMik’s flat accusing him of stealing Paul McCartney’s bass then we – the band and our manager Doug Smith – would certainly have heard about it from him. But we didn’t. I don’t believe it.”
The lost bass project was initiated in 2018 by Höfner UK boss Nick Wass who, in 2023, enlisted the sleuthing skills of journalists Scott and Naomi Jones, dubbed The Bass Detectives in the film. The duo eventually unearth the light-fingered miscreant, but during the documentary they claim that Hawkwind were “famously anti-Beatles” and wrote anti-Beatles songs.
“What a load of rubbish that is,” Brock says. “I think every band member had a copy of Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt Pepper. Lemmy loved The Beatles, they were his rock'n'roll heroes. As for anti-Beatles songs… I have no idea what they’re going on about."
Another idea posited as a motive for the theft was that Hawkwind had recently had around £10k’s worth of their own gear stolen.
“That was Bickershaw festival [in May ‘72]. The gear was stolen, and the van. But we wouldn’t turn around and do that to other bands,” Brock says. “Anyone who knows anything about Hawkwind knows our story. We did loads of free gigs, constantly, we raised lots of money for communities and causes… one of our roadies stole a mic from the BBC at Maida Vale studios in 1971, but we gave it back.”
Brock says the filmmakers, Passion Pictures, never approached him to contribute to The Hunt For The Lost Bass. Instead, bafflingly, they went to Canada to interview Deviants/Pink Fairies guitarist Paul Rudolph. Rudolph became Hawkwind’s bassist in 1975 after Lemmy had been sacked, and he had absolutely no insider intel on the Höfner episode.
“That interview had nothing to do with the story,” Brock says. “I thought, ‘Why have they done that when we’re so easy to contact?’ I reckon it’s because we’d tell ‘em to f*ck off [laughs].”
“We’re easy targets,” Brock says. “We’re anti-establishment and were friends with Hells Angels. They wouldn’t do this to someone like Pink Floyd.”
By the end of the film, when the mystery is solved and McCartney is reunited with the instrument, Hawkwind are fully in the clear.
“It was a boring story that could have been done in half an hour and they needed something to spice it up,” says Brock. “I don’t think Paul had much to do with this. They dragged him into an empty room that looked like an old squat, and then they gave him his bass back.
“I’d tell the filmmakers that there’s a lot of pissed off fans out there, and if DikMik was still alive I think he’d sue ‘em,” Brock states.
“I was pissed off after watching it: it disrespects DikMik, and it disrespects the band, and that wasn’t even necessary in the end.”
Paul McCartney: The Hunt For The Lost Bass is available via the BBC iPlayer.
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