“I just said, ‘Sell all the assets…’ not really thinking that this instrument would accrue so much in value”: Facing mounting debts, Nick Beggs sold off the bass he used on Kajagoogoo’s Too Shy – 40 years later his fans helped him buy it back

Steven Wilson bassist Nick Beggs has been reunited with his long-lost bass guitar, 40 years after he was forced to sell it, and it’s come at a high price.

Beggs, a prolific player in the prog scene, began his music career with British synth-pop outfit Kajagoogoo. Early single Too Shy dominated the airwaves in 1983, but what looked like a rosy future for the band soon grew darker.

As Beggs told Bass Player in 2021, Too Shy “sold over three million copies and was the 13th biggest single of 1983”.

It has also featured in the TV series Black Mirror and American Horror Story, but Beggs has also dismissed the album from which it came, White Feathers, as “a triumph of style over content.”

The bass was built in 1979 by High Wycombe, UK-based firm Wal, which was then operating under the name Electric Wood Limited. Later purchased second-hand by Beggs, the instrument was used to record Too Shy – but it quickly went from a prized possession to a victim of collateral damage.

“It had one owner before me,” Beggs tells the BBC. “I saw an advert in the back of Melody Maker, and went down to Vauxhall and bought it for, not an insignificant amount of money, but considerably less than it’s worth now; I had to buy it back for over £15,000 [approximately $20,600].”

By 1985, the band’s success was dwindling, marred by internal strife and singles that failed to replicate the success of Too Shy. Then financial troubles were afoot.

“It was a company asset,” Beggs says of the bass. “When you have a record deal, you usually end up buying [the gear] with the money of the company that you set up. We had problems with our management, who left us insolvent to the tune of £250,000, and we had debts.

“So I could have bought the bass, but I was just so sick and tired of it all back then, I just said, ‘Sell all the assets and pay off the debts,’ and that’s what we did, not really thinking that this instrument would accrue so much in value.”

Time passed, and the bass became a thing of the past. Then, his daughter took the initiative to reverse the damage done all those years ago.

“There’s another nice side to this story, and that was that the fans rallied round, with the help of my wonderful daughter,” Beggs continues. “She set up a GoFundMe page, and the fans chipped in £5,000 towards this because I didn’t want to pay for my own providence. I sold a bass, I sold some of my artwork, and the fans brought the rest.

“So I made an album last year using this bass and made it freely available as a thank you to the fans.”

The wittily titled Wal Mart is available as a free download via Bandcamp and is also streaming in full on YouTube.

The reunion was also documented by the bassist in typically bonkers fashion, which you can see in the video above.

In July last year, Beggs gave a candid interview with Bass Player, discussing everything from his audition for the Blue Man Group to lessons learned from Frank Zappa.

A freelance writer with a penchant for music that gets weird, Phil is a regular contributor to Prog, Guitar World, and Total Guitar magazines and is especially keen on shining a light on unknown artists. Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings. He’s also a published author and is currently penning his debut novel which chucks fantasy, mythology and humanity into a great big melting pot.