In the world of The Beatles, now and then have increasingly gone hand in hand. 50 years of Sgt Pepper’s were celebrated with unreleased items from the vault, and an almost unthinkable new addition – a remix of one of the world’s most famous albums. The Get Back sessions, likewise were commemorated with Peter Jackson’s complete revisit of the audio/visual material from Twickenham and Savile Row. There was a Let It Be box set, of course – but also a new kind of reality series: by turns uncomfortable, thrilling and inspiring, put together with material restored using AI techniques.
In title and ethos, “Now And Then”, the new and apparently last Beatles song, fits well with that profile. Like a drama on BBC4, it’s something which takes place on several different timelines: originating in a late 1970s John Lennon demo, worked on but abandoned during the “Threetles” sessions for Anthology in 1995, and then picked up again by Paul McCartney in 2022. It’s a final – he thinks – look at the Beatle itch he hadn’t previously been able to scratch.
If you were being pedantic, you’d say that what we’re listening to here isn’t so much the Beatles as the Former Beatles – this being the…
