It’s a jingle-jangle morning: KT Tunstall has finally been reunited with her tambourine. The Radio 2 favourite was playing a gig in Wick in the Scottish Highlands on Friday night when the “sentimentally very valuable” percussion piece was stolen off the stage by an opportunistic fan. After launching a Twitter appeal and #wherestambo hashtag, a few more memes and several decent puns yielded the right result: Tambo mysteriously arrived back at her hotel, alone in a taxi.
Tunstall is one of many musicians who has had to beg or charm the public into giving back the tools of their trade. Much stolen kit never returns: Iggy Pop and The Decemberists have both lost their entire collections to professional thieves. Sometimes, though, it does come rolling home, even years later.
Sonic Youth were victims of the Hatton Garden of kit robberies when, in 1999, they lost a van containing most of the customised kit that had watermarked all their landmark albums. As recently as 2012, the seventh and eighth of these guitars finally rolled back round. Others remain outstanding, and some have appeared on eBay as far away as Belgium. The first big recoup of swag came in 2006 via two teenagers who had been living out of a car, one of whom claimed his uncle had been involved in the original theft. For a few hundred dollars and a promise of anonymity, they lead the the band to only a couple of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo’s Jazzmasters. Ironically enough, the heavy switch-stripping, tone-knob-breaking ethos of the alternative pioneers gives their instruments a low value on the bog-standard resale market.
In December of last year, every guitar teacher’s favourite guitarist, Steve Vai, lost his famous “Bo” at a benefit show for a bandmate with cancer. Bo turned up 48 hours later in the bushes outside his home. The thief’s knowledge of his address suggests a superfan, rather than a chancer – especially as Vai’s mirrored JEM was unfloggable: one of a kind, unmistakably handmade for the prince of tedious widdly-widdly showing-off.
A superfan was also to blame when Johnny Marr lost his cherry-red Gibson SG after a Healers gig at the Scala, London, in 2000. The £30,000 unit turned up a decade later, being proudly displayed in the lounge of 38-year-old Stephen White, after a tip-off from an acquaintance led to a police raid. After finding out it was a fan rather than a pro, Marr said he bore him no malice.
In 2012, Tom Petty posted a $7,500 (£5,700) reward for information leading to the return of his $100,000 guitar collection, which had disappeared backstage in Culver City, California. Fans soon started chipping in with contributions to up the reward, until a few days later, cops knocked on the door of a security guard at Culver Studios, who had tried to pawn a guitar for $250.
The most expensive kit losses are inevitably classical, though. There was the case of the £1.3m Stradivarius taken from Min-Jin Kym in a Pret a Manger in Euston, central London, whose thieves were caught not long after Googling “Stradivarius” in an internet cafe. And just last month, Krysia Osostowicz put her £200,000 Francesco Goffriller violin down in Brixton, south London, to lock up her bike, when it was swiped. The 200-year-old star of hits such as the Four Seasons and Adagio for Strings was found a few days later in Cash Converters in nearby Streatham, where someone was attempting to sell it on for £50, 1/4000th of its value.
