IT’S a song that has been 45 years in the making, but yesterday The Beatles returned for a glorious last hurrah with new single Now And Then.
Tens of thousands of fans across the globe set alarms for 2pm UK time to hear John Lennon come back to life on the track, which will undoubtedly shoot straight to the No1 spot next Friday.
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As Liam Gallagher put it: “Absolutely incredible, biblical, celestial, heartbreaking and heart-warming all at the same time.
“Long live The Beatles.”
Rather less poetically, he later added: “The Beatles could s**t in my handbag, I’d still hide my polo mints in there.”
It’s crass, but I admit I understand the sentiment.
Paul McCartney, alongside Ringo Starr, used artificial intelligence to rework the track, which John first started working on in the late Seventies.
Bringing the tune to life was an emotional process for the pair, with Paul admitting that hearing John’s voice again took him back in time.
He said yesterday: “When we were in the studio we had John’s voice in our ears so you could imagine he was just in the next room in a vocal booth or something, and we were just working with him again, so it was joyful.
“It was really lovely, you know, because we hadn’t experienced that for a long time obviously and then suddenly here we were working with old Johnny.”
It was John’s wife, Yoko Ono, who found the original recording of the song after John was murdered in December 1980 by crazed fantasist Mark Chapman.
Recalling the moment Yoko handed over some of John’s unfinished work, Paul explained: “Before John died he was working on some songs and Yoko spoke to George Harrison and said, ‘I’ve got a cassette with some John songs on that he never got to finish.
“Would you be interested in finishing them off?’.
“So we thought about it and we thought, ‘Yeah, it would be great’, because in a way we would be working with John again, which we thought we would never be able to do.
“We worked and finished two of the songs but we didn’t get round to finishing the third one.
“And the third one is called Now And Then.
“So it was knocking around for a long time and I kept thinking, ‘There’s something here, you know, we should finish this’.”
Paul added: “I ended up talking to Ringo and we asked him if he fancied putting the drums on again and then I thought, ‘Well, I could up the bass a bit’, so I put the bass on again.
“We already had George playing guitar and we had John on vocal, it was kind of magical doing it.
“So we ended up making it into a real record and that’s what’s being released.”
After finally hearing Now And Then, fans admitted they were overwhelmed by John’s voice again.
One fan, Harry, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Now And Then by The Beatles is absolutely beautiful.
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“What an unexpected but wonderful end to The Beatles’ incredible discography.
“What a treat to experience a new release by The Beatles.
“Some- thing that I never thought I would have in my lifetime.”
Louise McPherson added: “Getting strangely emotional as I listen to Now And Then . . . the last Beatles song . . . hauntingly beautiful.”
Long-time fan Michael Warburton told his followers: “The most poignant, beautiful full-stop to the greatest band in the history of music.”
While Beatlemania began in the Sixties, the influence of the group’s music on modern-day stars is impossible to deny.
Now And Then will undoubtedly continue to inspire the next generation, and Paul admitted that he was still flattered to hear singers, including Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, talk about their music.
Appearing on Radio 1, Paul said: “It’s a great thing, because in speaking to people like Dave and other people like that, they say we didn’t know what was coming.
“It’s like us, we were listening to early rock’n’roll records and they had so much influence on us, it just inspired us.
“So it’s lovely to think millions of people like Billie Eilish and the Arctic Monkeys . . . it’s so great that the next generation got inspired by The Beatles.”
“I can’t blame them, mind you.”
Read Related Also: Who is rapper MC Harvey?
Now and Then – The Beatles
★★★★☆
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“KEEP that one, mark it fab.”
These are the words of Paul McCartney near the start of Peter Jackson’s short film about The Beatles’ last song, Now And Then.
He wasn’t specifically talking about John Lennon’s 1978 demo which has finally surfaced with sublime embellishments from Macca, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
He could have been though, such is the emotional pull of The Fab Four’s last hurrah.
It’s not in the same league as Strawberry Fields Forever or Hey Jude or what I consider to be their greatest song, A Day In The Life, but that’s not the point.
Now And Then is a bruised ballad, the lyrics betraying Lennon’s softer side from his years of domestic bliss in New York with Yoko and little son Sean, just before his life was so cruelly taken.
But for those of us to whom The Beatles mean so much, to hear the other three bringing his track to life, in what Macca calls a “Beatley” way, makes for a moving four minutes and eight seconds.
In the film, Sir Paul says: “All of those memories come flooding back.
“My God, how lucky was I to have those men in my life and to work with those men so intimately and to come up with such a body of music.
“To still be working on Beatles music in 2023 . . . wow!
“This is probably the last Beatles song and we’ve all played on it, so it is a genuine Beatles recording.”
As for Ringo, he affirms that it is the “closest we’ll ever come to having him (John) back in the room”.
The chorus of, “Now and then, I miss you/Oh, now and then, I want you to be there for me”, doesn’t take a big leap of faith to imagine that it could be about the four likely lads from Liverpool who went their separate ways in 1970.
The song comes from the same cassette tape of demos, marked “For Paul”, that yielded Free As A Bird and Real Love.
Those two efforts, with additions from the surviving Beatles, appeared in 1995 as singles to promote the three Anthology volumes but the technology wasn’t available to finish this third composition to a high enough standard.
Now, using the AI wizardry first employed by The Lord Of The Rings director Jackson for the astonishing fly-on-the wall Get Back movie and, subsequently, by producer Giles Martin on the remaster of the Revolver album, Lennon’s reedy vocals come through crystal clear.
McCartney explains the problems they faced back in the mid-Nineties: “Every time I wanted a little bit more of John’s voice, this piano came through and clouded the picture.
“I think we kind of ran out of steam a bit and time and it was like, ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll leave this one’.”
You can just tell from the way he talks about Now And Then that it means so much to 81-year-old Macca on a deep and personal level.
He, more than the others, wanted The Beatles to carry on and is clearly the driver of this project.
“It just languished in a cupboard and then, in 2001, we lost George, which kind of took the wind out of our sails,” he adds.
“It took almost a quarter of a century for us to wait until the right moment to tackle Now And Then again.”
So we have new guitar, bass and vocal harmony parts by Paul, including a Harrison-style guitar solo, new drumming from Ringo and George’s rhythm guitar from the 1994 session.
McCartney considers whether Lennon would have approved.
“Let’s say I had a chance to ask John, ‘Hey John, would you like us to finish this last song of yours?’.
“I’m telling you, I know the answer would have been, ‘Yeah!’. He would’ve loved that.”
Now And Then comes with tasteful orchestrations, nothing new when you consider the use of strings on many of the band’s classic songs.
McCartney says: “I’d been vaguely thinking strings might be a good thing.
“The Beatles did lots of strings things, you know, Strawberry Fields, Yesterday, I Am The Walrus.
“Giles (Martin) worked up an arrangement like Giles’s dad (George) would have done in the old days.
“We had to put the music out on the stands for the musicians, but we couldn’t tell them it was a new Beatles song.
“It was all a bit hush hush. We pretended it was something of mine.”
Of course it’s sad to think that this is the last Beatles song, but who would have thought Britain’s greatest pop exports would be releasing new music in 2023?
Fittingly the Now And Then single comes backed with a recent remaster of the song that kick-started the revolution, their very first single from October 1962, Love Me Do.
More than 60 years on, we still love them. We do!
By Simon Cosyns
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