Last week, The Beatles released what’s been dubbed as their last new song, “Now And Then.” The song was written and recorded in the late 1970s as a demo by John Lennon, who died in 1980.
Following his death, the remaining Beatles, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, continued to tinker with the song. Harrison, however, also passed away in 2001.
The song was given to the surviving band members by Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono in 1994 along with demos for “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love.” The two latter songs would appear on “The Beatles Anthology,” but “Now And Then” didn’t make the cut because there was no way at the time to isolate Lennon’s vocals.
That changed when director Peter Jackson restored audio from footage taken in 1969 in his 2021 docuseries, “The Beatles: Get Back.” Jackson worked to separate Lennon’s audio for “Now And Then,” opening the door for it to see the light of day.
“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” McCartney said via The Beatles website. “It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording.”
The music video has also premiered on The Beatles YouTube channel.
Jackson said of doing the video: “When Apple asked me to make the music video, I was very reluctant — I thought my next few months would be a hell of a lot more fun if that tricky task was somebody else’s problem, and I could be like any other Beatles fan, enjoying the night-before-Christmas anticipation as the release of a new Beatles song and music video approached — in 1995, l loved the childlike excitement I felt as the release of ‘Free As A Bird’ was inching closer. I could have that experience once again — all I had to do was say no to The Beatles.”
“To be honest, just thinking about the responsibility of having to make a music video worthy of the last song The Beatles will ever release produced a collection of anxieties almost too overwhelming to deal with.”
Jackson worried about lack of suitable footage for the video.
“Nothing at all seemed to exist showing Paul, George and Ringo working on ‘Now And Then’ in 1995 …” Jackson continued. “There’s not much footage of John in the mid-seventies when he wrote the demo … I grizzled about the lack of unseen Beatles footage from the ’60s … And they didn’t even shoot any footage showing Paul and Ringo working on the song last year.”
“I knew The Beatles don’t take no for an answer if their minds are set on something — but they didn’t even wait for me to say no. I found myself swept along as they quickly addressed my
concerns. Paul and Ringo shot footage of themselves performing and sent that to me. Apple unearthed over 14 hours of long forgotten film shot during the 1995 recording sessions, including several hours of Paul, George and Ringo working on ‘Now And Then’, and gave all that to me. Sean and Olivia found some great unseen home movie footage and sent that. To cap things off, a few precious seconds of The Beatles performing in their leather suits, the earliest known film of The Beatles and never seen before, was kindly supplied by Pete Best.”
“We wanted the short film to bring a few tears to the eye, but generating emotion using only archive footage is a tricky thing. Fortunately, the simple power of this beautiful song did a lot of the work for us.”
“To be honest, while we hope we’ve given The Beatles a suitable final farewell, that’s something you’ll need to decide for yourselves.”
The video for “Now And Then” can be viewed below.
