TIM DE LISLE

The Beatles

Now And Then Out now

The Chemical Brothers

AO Arena, Manchester

Brian Eno & Baltic Sea Philharmonic

Royal Festival Hall, London

Half a century after they broke up, The Beatles are having quite a decade. Peter Jackson’s Get Back was a triumph, Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics a bestseller, Giles Martin’s remixed Revolver a revelation. How do you follow all that? By getting the band back together, sort of.

Now And Then, billed as ‘the last Beatles song’, features all four Fabs, right. John Lennon wrote it at the piano in 1977, during his househusband period. George Harrison added guitar in 1995, while also calling the song ‘f***ing rubbish’. Now Paul has finished it. He plays the bass, as ever, with Ringo Starr on drums.

The music is pure Lennon – a piano ballad, fearlessly simple. The lyric is less characteristic, as it’s ambiguous. Half a love song, half a lament for love gone wrong. It could be about The Beatles.

Paul’s first Beatles production credit is fully earned. What begins as a Lennon solo track – raw, nasal, lonesome – builds into a Beatles song before our ears.

The chorus, when Lennon and McCartney’s voices come together, is magical. And the whole thing is Beatleish.

The drums have Ringo’s swing, the strings are very Eleanor Rigby, and Paul’s guitar solo has George’s deftness.

Now And Then is not quite a classic but it’s very classy. It easily outshines Free As A Bird, The Beatles’ first bid to get back. Suffused with love and loss, it has the feel of a farewell.

This was a week when you couldn’t tell what the main live draw would be. It might well have been The Chemical Brothers, with their ability to turn an arena into a nightclub.

For 20 minutes they were excellent. The rhythms were exhilarating, the videos endearing. Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands exuded warmth for Manchester, where they met as students. But the next 80 minutes were just more of the same, and, as The Beatles proved, variety is the spice of pop.

So the gig of the week was a more unlikely one. Brian Eno, pop polymath, mentor to everyone from Talking Heads to Fred Again, is famously stage-shy. Since leaving Roxy Music in 1973 he has done more albums than gigs. Now 75, he has come out to play with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic. The hall is alive with the sight of 40 musicians swaying beneath a scintillating light show. And the music is compelling – ghostly then full-bodied, sombre then playful, discordant and then suddenly delicious.