Paul McCartney‘s psychedelic tour bus that his former band Wings used 50 years ago is going up for auction.
The double decker is being sold by Omega Auctions in Merseyside tomorrow (October 8) at an estimated value of £15,000-£25,000.
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The bus originally served local routes in Essex and Norfolk in the 1950s and 60s before it was purchased by McCartney, for Wings’ summer tour in 1972. You can view the double decker in the video below.
After the jaunt, it eventually ended up at outside a rock cafe in Tenerife before being moved to the cafe owner’s garden. “I went to visit them about 10 years ago and saw this thing rotting away in his back garden, ‘I said, ‘I want it’,” current owner Justin James told BBC News.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, I just thought that it should not be rotting away on the wastelands of Tenerife. It took eight years to bring it back (to Oxfordshire) because it was in such a difficult part to get to, how it was buried in this field. We got cranes and I managed to get it back.”
Mr James said he hoped to use it for musical children’s tours, but it never got off the ground.
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“I reckon someone could get that engine going, but I’m not that person unfortunately,” he said. Mr James also said he had spent £25,000 on costs relating to the bus, and if it fetches more than that he will donate any profit to the Arms Around the Child charity, of which he is a trustee.
Meanwhile, lost footage of The Beatles was recently found in a bread bin in Wales.
The film was found during the clearance of a house, and sees the Fab Four being interviewed in Cardiff in 1965.