Beatles’ last-ever song finally released
● Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison laboured for years over what they knew would be The Beatles’ last-ever song.
Haunted by the voice of their bandmate John Lennon, who was murdered by a crazed fan in 1980, the trio slogged away in the studio trying to get a clear sound from the recording given to them by Lennon’s partner, Yoko Ono.
For McCartney, the idea of finishing the troubled recording seemed very far away — until AI technology gave the pop pioneer fresh hope.
Almost 50 years since Lennon recorded the earliest version of Now and Then, fans were this week able to hear the group’s final song. Working alongside Get Back director Peter Jackson’s team, the final version debuted on BBC radio on Thursday at 2pm.
A short film detailing the making of the song was uploaded to the band’s YouTube channel on Wednesday and has garnered more than 1.4-million views. The story of its release is a complicated saga in which only two of the original four will ever get to enjoy these last, bittersweet fruits of their labour.
Despite Lennon having announced his intention to quit the band in 1969, the Fab Four didn’t officially split until five years later, when tensions over Ono’s involvement, disputes over money, Lennon’s heroin addiction, and a clash of creative egos boiled over into an irreparable, ugly and ultimately tragic spat.
Lennon composed Now and Then in 1978, two years before he was shot dead outside his home in New York.
Having recorded it using a boombox, he added it to a cassette tape labelled “For Paul”, which Ono gave to McCartney when she found it among his possessions in 1994.
The remaining Beatles released two of the songs on the cassette — Free As a Bird and Real Love — aided by producer Jeff Lynne. But, despite their attempts in 1995 to work on a version of Now and Then, they were forced to shelve the project owing to the poor quality of the recording.
“After several days in the studio working on the track, George felt the technical issues with the demo were insurmountable and concluded that it was not possible to finish the track to a high-enough standard,” Harrison’s widow, Olivia Harrison, said.
About two decades later, Jackson — best known for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit — and dialogue editor Emile de la Rey were working on The Beatles: Get Back docuseries, using cutting-edge technology developed by his studio, WingNut Films, to demix the film’s mono soundtrack. In this way, it became possible to separate the individual voices and unearth conversations that had never been heard before.
McCartney wondered whether the same could be achieved with the recording he had long considered unfinished business. Jackson, De la Rey and a sound team got to work, applying the same technique to separate Lennon’s vocal performance from the piano, while maintaining the integrity and clarity of the original recording.
“There it was — John’s voice — crystal clear,” McCartney says, of the moment he heard Lennon’s clean vocals for the first time. “It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it — it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023, to be working on Beatles music, and about to release a song the public haven’t heard — I think it’s an exciting thing.”
He and Starr completed the song last year, using the electric and acoustic guitar parts recorded by Harrison in 1995, along with new drums by Starr, backing vocals, and a yearning strings arrangement written by McCartney, Ben Foster and Giles Martin.
In a poignant final touch, Martin added backing vocals from the original recordings of Eleanor Rigby, Because and Here, There and Everywhere, before producing the final version with McCartney and sending it to Spike Stent to be mixed.
“It was the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room, so it was very emotional for all of us,” Starr says. “It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.” Staff reporter