Yahoo News Why it’s taken 43 years for the final Beatles single to be released
Now and Then is being released today
The Beatles have released their final song Now and Then, but why now?
A great band like The Beatles should always call it a day with a glorious, career-capping single, but when you're the biggest-selling group of all time, the pressure to bid adieu with a nailed-on classic is immense.
Sadly, even the most loyal Beatles nut finds it hard to say anything good about Real Love. Released in 1996, Real Love has, for the last 27 years, been known as the last ever Beatles single.
Read more: Why did The Beatles split up?
But now a new track is claiming that title, and this Thursday what Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are calling “the final Beatles record”, finally drops more than a quarter century after work first began on it.
Why are The Beatles releasing Now and Then now?
The road from Real Love to Now And Then has been a long and winding one. From 1970 to 1995, the Beatles’ farewell single was the majestic Let It Be.
And every Fab Four fan took it as read that really was it, the conclusive full stop on a discography that stretched back to 1963 and the band’s debut single Love Me Do.
Watch: The documentary of the making of Now and Then
And with John Lennon’s murder in 1980, how could there ever be a reunion of the biggest band of all time?
What no fan could have known, however, was that Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono had, in the early 1990s, given Paul McCartney a cassette consisting of four uncompleted Lennon songs.
Two of those tracks — Free As A Bird and Real Love — were released in 1995 and ‘96 respectively, finally reuniting. through the marvels of then-state-of-the-art tech, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
The Fab Three had intended to ‘Beatle-ise’ all four songs, but work on the third — Now And Then — stalled after just a day, with Harrison labelling the original home recording "f***ing rubbish".
The problem, it appears, was that Lennon’s vocals – recorded on a scratchy tape recorder sat atop his piano, and in mono – couldn’t be extracted from the piano, limiting what the remaining Beatles, and producer Jeff Lynne, could do with it.
With Harrison rapidly losing interest, McCartney, Starr and Lynne abandoned work on the song, with McCartney telling Q magazine years later, “George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn't do it." (The fourth track on the tape, Grow Old With Me, was finally recorded by Ringo Starr for his 2019 album What's My Name, with Macca guesting on bass).
Read more: Inside the Last Beatles Song: How 'Now and Then' Brought the Fab Friends Together One Final Time (People, 14 min read)
For Beatles fans, the knowledge that there was a half-sketched final Fabs song out there made Now And Then – even in its incomplete form – the Holy Grail of Beatles recordings.
When George Harrison died in 2001, it was assumed that that third song – which had always been rumoured but never confirmed to be Now And Then – would never be finished.
But then, in 2012, Paul McCartney addressed the issue, telling the BBC in a documentary about Jeff Lynne: "That one's still lingering around. So I'm going to nick in with Jeff and do it. Finish it, one of these days."
How did The Beatles make Now and Then?
Fast-forward to 2022 and Macca confirmed on BBC Radio 4 that a new Beatles song was in the offing, now that technology had caught up enough to allow him and Ringo to finish what the Threetles had started in the 1990s:
“We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI [artificial intelligence],” McCartney told the Today programme.
“So then we were able to mix the record as you would normally do.”
The breakthrough, it seems, came with Peter Jackson's 2021 Get Back documentary, where cutting-edge AI software was used on the original footage’s mono soundtrack to separate the Beatles' voices from background noise.
The same process was later used for Paul McCartney’s festival-closing set at Glastonbury 2022, allowing him to ‘duet’ with Lennon on the Let It Be track I’ve Got A Feeling.
Now, 44 years after John Lennon demoed it at his home in New York City’s Dakota Building, Now And Then is finally seeing the light as a bona fide, fully-staffed Beatles recording.
Alongside Lennon’s original vocal from the late 70s, and electric and acoustic guitar parts played by George Harrison in ‘95, McCartney has recorded new bass, guitar and piano, while Ringo has laid down a new drum track. The two surviving Beatles have also contributed backing vocals.
That’s not all. There’s also a new string arrangement, penned by McCartney with the track’s co-producer Giles Martin (son of original Beatles producer George Martin) and composer Ben Foster, while harmonies culled from Here, There And Everywhere, Eleanor Rigby and Because have been woven into the song.
“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” said Macca about the recording of Now And Then. “It’s quite emotional.
"And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”
“It was the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room, so it was very emotional for all of us,” Ringo added in the song’s press release. “It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.”
And whereas the George Harrison of 1995 clearly didn’t think much of Lennon’s rough and ready demo, his widow Olivia believes that, with today’s technology, the guitarist would have been keen to complete the song.
“If he were here today,” she says, “Dhani [George’s son] and I know he would have whole-heartedly joined Paul and Ringo in completing the recording of Now And Then.”
To underline how this really is the final Beatles recording, Apple are releasing a double A-sided disc, with Now And Then on one side, and the band’s debut single, Love Me Do, on the flip. The group’s first and last songs on one record, 60 years apart.
And to make the release even more poignant, it’s worth noting what John Lennon’s last words were to the man he’d first met at Liverpool’s Woolton's Parish Church in 1957: “Think about me,” he told McCartney, “every now and then, old friend."
Now And Then is available worldwide now. Pre-order on CD, or pre-order the vinyl.
On 10 November, The Beatles’ 1962-1966 (‘The Red Album’) and 1967-1970 (‘The Blue Album’) collections will be released in 2023 Edition packages by Apple Corps Ltd./Capitol/UMe.
Watch a trailer for Now and Then
