Wings Tour Bus Not Sold At Auction

The colorful painted bus which Wings used for their 1972 tour in Europe, went for sale today at an auction of Beatles memorabilia, but was not sold ultimately. The bus should have yielded between £ 15,000 and £ 25,000, but no bid was done.

Almost 50 years ago, Paul McCartney and his band Wings decided to use an open-top double-decker during the Wings Over Europe Tour. "We painted the outside psychedelic, like a magic bus," McCartney was quoted by the BBC. "If you look at it very straight, very conventionally, it was quite a mad thing to do, to put a playpen on the top deck of the bus and put all the children in there while driving around Europe. It was not what you'd expect from a normal band. But we weren't a normal band."

Footage of the bus, Eat At Home (live)

The current owner, Justin James, found the bus in a terrible state, about ten years ago on the Spanish island of Tenerife. The bus had initially served as a crowd puller at a rock café on the island, but eventually ended up in the garden of the pub owner. There the vehicle slowly rusted away and was overgrown by weeds. James decided to save the tour bus and bring it back to England. But that turned out not to be an easy task. Justin James to the BBC:

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."

See the tour bus in its current state here

In 2017 the bus  was spotted for the first time in the United Kingdom again. Also by McCartney himself, or his team, who then made an appeal for the double-decker's whereabouts:

We’ve heard that the 1972 Wings tour bus is back on the road in the UK. Have info on this? Send us a DM! pic.twitter.com/IZ7DUwZNiB

— Paul McCartney (@PaulMcCartney) December 10, 2017

Justin James planned to use the bus for musical children's tours, but that didn't work out. Now that he is emigrating to Australia next month, he decided to sell the double-decker. He was hoping to see some of the £ 25,000 back that he claimed to have spent on costs relating to the bus.

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André Homan

André Homan is a Dutch writer and journalist.

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