AI-enhanced song released at 2pm GMT today, but Beatles experts are divided over how effectively it could capture the band’s spirit
George Harrison originally disliked it; fans had long assumed it would never be released. But the “final” song by the Beatles, Now and Then, is being released at 2pm GMT, an unexpected last flourish for arguably the UK’s greatest band.
“It’s a big moment,” says Dr Holly Tessler of the University of Liverpool, who specialises in the Beatles’ history and legacy. “It’s strange to think that a band that broke up more than 50 years ago is telling you that this is our last song … in a way, Paul and Ringo, who are both in their 80s, are drawing a line. It’s a very sweet moment I suspect for almost all Beatles fans; it feels like an ending. So I do think it’s significant.”
The song features musical contributions from all four members of the group including guitar recorded by the late George Harrison in 1995, and vocals by John Lennon drawn from the song’s original late-70s demo. It was written and sung by Lennon at his home in New York City’s Dakota building, where he was murdered in 1980.
Then, in 1994, Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow, handed the demo to Paul McCartney, in a cassette labelled “For Paul”. It also contained vocals from Lennon for the tracks Free As a Bird and Real Love, which were worked into completed songs by McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr, and released in 1995 as part of the Beatles’ multimedia archive project Anthology. But Harrison’s widow Olivia has said George “felt the technical issues with [Now and Then] were insurmountable and concluded that it was not possible to finish the track to a high enough standard”. It has been shelved ever since.
Philip Norman, who has written biographies of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison as well as the acclaimed Shout! The True Story of the Beatles, explains: “Strangely enough it was always George Harrison who was at heads with Paul McCartney about releasing this song during the 1990s; George had previously said it was not good enough to release.
