The song’s creation is a marvel of technology and time travel and an act of reanimation that would leave Dr. Frankenstein green with envy. Photo / Getty Images
The song’s creation is a marvel of technology and time travel and an act of reanimation that would leave Dr. Frankenstein green with envy. Photo / Getty Images
The Fab Four have finally reached the end of the long and winding road. It has, as predicted, led back to your door. “Your”, in this instance, of course referring to The Beatles themselves.
But, as always, The Beatles’ greatest trick is the universality of their specificity. Anyone who has experienced great loss will find comfort in the warm melancholia and relatably broad lyrics penned and performed by John Lennon on Now and Then, the final Beatles song ever.
The song’s creation is a marvel of technology and time travel and an act of reanimation that would leave Dr Frankenstein green with envy. It started life as a Lennon demo recorded on cassette in the 70s before being discovered in a box by Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono when she was gathering up material for The Beatle’s 90s Anthology project.
Alongside the plodding Free as a Bird and the lightweight Real Love, the Beatles that were alive at that time, bassist Paul McCartney, lead guitarist George Harrison and drummer Ringo Starr, got to work. The idea was that each of the three Anthology releases would boast a brand new Beatles song amongs all the alternative takes, demos and curios that they’d compiled. The other two songs were released as planned, but Now and Then was shelved due to Lennon’s heavy-handed piano playing on the song drowning out his vocals in crucial parts of the song.
Then, in 2021 along came Sir Pete and his ambitious, impressive and, frankly, mindblowing work on Get Back, the epic eight-hour Beatles documentary that completely reframed the group’s Let It Be sessions.
The Beatles celebrate the completion of their new album, 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', at a press conference held in west London. Photo / Getty Images
His computers and AI algorithms did the Lord’s work in isolating, cleaning and boosting the muffled or distant audio that’d been captured on the old, dusty original film from the 60s.
At some point during production, Macca slipped him Lennon’s Now and Then demo and asked him to get straight onto cleaning it up now and pronto. The result was a startling, crystal clear, isolated track of the long-departed Lennon’s wistful vocal.
The time had finally come for Now and Then. Harrison’s acoustic guitar was salvaged from the aborted Anthology sessions and Macca and Starr picked up their instruments and set about finally finishing the track.
The song is a psychedelic-tinged rock ballad, complete with appropriately tasteful, emotion-swelling and, in the bridge, very trippy, orchestral strings arrangements.
Written during Lennon’s unashamedly sentimental phase in the late 70s it’s unlikely he had the song in mind for his former band chums. But had he finished and released it, the song wouldn’t sound as - and I’m sorry but there’s no other word for it - Beatlesesque.
The Beatles perform in November 1963. Photo / Getty Images
The harmonies, the melody, the running bass fills, the shuffling, rocksteady beat and thunderingly idiosyncratic tom fills… Solo, the four Beatles could sometimes approach greatness. Together, they made it look easy.
Lennon most likely was singing about Yoko in lines like “I know it’s true, It’s all because of you” or the more direct “Now and then, I miss you”. On one of his solo albums, it wouldn’t be up for debate.
But saddled with legacy and history, the fact that the three other Beatles are playing on it and the incredibly weighty burden of being the final, last ever, Beatles song? Well, Now and Then doesn’t take on new meaning, it has new meaning unceremoniously dumped on top of it. An unfair situation for any song. Let alone one that wasn’t written to carry that weight a long time.
The Beatles on stage at the London Palladium. Photo / Getty Images
I was filled with undeniable excitement to spin a new Beatles song. Like many, my love for the group stretches back decades and it’d be an understatement to say they played a pivotal role in my appreciation and understanding of music. I got up in the pitch black dark and wonderful quiet of 4am, made a coffee, slipped it on and slipped away inside of it.
The emotional power of Lennon’s voice is startlingly undiminished despite being decades old and ran through the machine. The song’s reflective vibe and the awareness that - as Harrison would famously assert after leaving the Beatles - all things must pass was only heightened by Sir Pete’s nostalgic, joyfully loopy and tear-jerking music video.
But what I found most confronting of all was the song’s finality. It’s a song about missing your loved ones, and what they mean to you and how you are who you are because of them. It is the final song by The Beatles and it encompasses and lives up to everything such loftiness entails without succumbing to pomp or faux sincerity.
Now and Then is a haunting and haunted song. It’s a song written and performed by ghosts and accompanied by the ache of the living.
