The Beatles’ Now and Then — ‘last song’ imagines an alternative future

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“Now and Then” is billed as the last Beatles song, an odd notion for a band that broke up in 1970, half of whose members are no longer alive. It mainly owes its existence to Paul McCartney’s mingled attributes of obduracy and sentimentality, although new machine-learning technology and the revelatory storytelling of 2021’s Get Back documentary series have also played a role. Like a seance, the result requires a leap of faith, the desire to hear the dead speak and quite a lot of trickery.

The song is based on a demo recording made by John Lennon in 1979. It was one of several given to Lennon’s former bandmates by his widow Yoko Ono in the mid-1990s. Two of them, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”, were fleshed out and released with great fanfare for their Beatles Anthology project. Their reception was lukewarm. “Now and Then” was worked on but rejected. George Harrison thought the original recording was “fucking terrible”. McCartney, keen to continue, reluctantly shelved it. 

In its original format, Lennon sits at a piano singing reedily about an ambiguously ended relationship. The chorus has a moment of tension that makes us want to find out more, but the rest trudges around in a muffled search for a working ballad. This poorly recorded demo has now been gussied up by the two surviving Beatles. 

McCartney’s bass and Ringo Starr’s drums give the flimsy song a new solidity. Harrison is posthumously present with a guitar part from the failed 1990s studio sessions. Lennon’s warble has been extracted and foregrounded by music-processing software, although it’s still rather thin. He’s backed by sumptuous vocal harmonies. A big string arrangement by Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin, adds a Beatlesy flavour, and also some Hollywood emotional heft. 

There’s a slide guitar solo played by McCartney in mimicry of Harrison’s signature style. The guitarist didn’t start playing slide until 1969 when The Beatles were all but over. “Now and Then” thus imagines an alternative future for the band. It resembles a big-budget version of a minor-key curio that they might have come up with had they not split up. 

The concept is linked to The Beatles: Get Back, which breathed new life into the exhaustively told tale of The Beatles’ final years. (Its director Peter Jackson has made the video for “Now and Then”.) Unlike the documentary series, however, the song makes a negligible addition to their legacy. Its plaintiveness isn’t so much down to the quality of Lennon’s vocal when he sings “Now and then, I miss you” as the quality of our feelings for The Beatles. 

With McCartney and Starr both in their eighties, the time when the world ceases to contain a living Beatle is approaching. This inexorable fact separates “Now and Then” from its fellow bastardised oddities, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”. It’s a highly artificed song, but the emotions it taps into are real.

★★★☆☆

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