The Beatles’ last song Now And Then reminds us why we still love the Fab Four
RATING: 4 AND A HALF STARS OUT OF 5
“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.
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"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?
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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!