Why the Beatles’ new song Now and Then is the most important record of 2023
Wikipedia called it a psychedelic soft rock ballad, even though it was anything but. Some thought it slight, a filigree morsel. They listened and listened and, try as they might, were disappointed, and came away sensing corporate overreach and digital plagiarism.
Friends of mine in the music industry called it soppy, maudlin, wet. Others became sick of the hype almost immediately or complained about AI being used to enhance and delineate John Lennon’s croaky, indistinct voice. For me, and millions of others, it was a legitimate link with a part of our history which, even if we were too young to experience it first time around, remains hallowed and cherished. In 2023, the Beatles made another record. And it was good.
There were other so-called legacy releases this year: the much-celebrated Angry, by the Rolling Stones, which rather brilliantly repurposed the riff from Start Me Up, and Atomic City by U2, recorded to celebrate the start of the band’s epoch-making residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
Both were worthy of the people who made them. Now and Then was the record that properly resonated, though, because the seemingly never-ending story of the Beatles is the great counter-narrative of post-war Britain, a journey that links austerity and the end of rationing with IG and TikTok; that travels from the sexual revolution of the sixties to the creative insurgence of AI.
It is also a story of family, romance, heartbreak and renewal; a soap opera the likes of which we had never seen before. The Beatles were the most mediated entity of the late twentieth century, a phenomenon not unrelated to the fact that they were extraordinarily brilliantat what they did. And what they still continue to do (on a personal note, this is also why I am always slightly suspicious of those who claim not to like the Beatles; it seems like an irrational dislike of your children or your parents).
Now and Then was initially a demo, which Lennon had made in his New York apartment in 1977. In 1994 his widow, Yoko Ono, gave the recording to the surviving members of the Beatles, for inclusion on the multimedia Anthology project – a TV documentary, three-volume set of double albums and a book tracing the band's history.
But while the band successfully tarted-up Lennon’s other demos – Free as a Bird and Real Love – they were unable to get Now and Then up to an acceptable standard. However, thanks the MAL software used on Peter Jackson’s Get Back, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were able to bring all four members back together for one final effort.
George Harrison was not a fan of the latest final Beatles single. Thirty years ago, he called it “fucking rubbish”. His widow believes, however, that he finally gave it his blessing through the medium of an old clock. Olivia Harrison says they bought a folk-art timepiece in1997 that had Scrabble letters on the base spelling Now and Then. For years after George’s death in 2001 it sat in a summer house but last year, she brought it into the home and was just putting it on a mantelpiece when the phone rang. It was McCartney, asking her if she remembered the abandoned song, “I was looking at the clock dumbfounded,” she says. “It felt like some kind of sign from George. It felt like approval.”
During an interview with BBC Radio 1, McCartney explained: “Before John died, he was working on some songs, and Yoko spoke to George Harrison and said, ‘I’ve got a cassette with some John songs on that he never got to finish, would you be interested in finishing them off?’ So we thought about it, and we thought, ‘Yeah, it would be great’, 'cause in a way we would be working with John again,which we thought we would never be able to do.”
Unsurprisingly, we embraced it as though it were a new Harry Potter book, giving the Beatles their first number single since The Ballad of John and Yoko in 1969. The 54-year gap between them marks another landmark achievement for the Beatles, who have eclipsed a record set by Kate Bush in 2022 when Running Up That Hill landed at the top spot. Bush’s last song to reach number one – Wuthering Heights – came 44 years earlier.
And while there remains much debate about this, I think creatively Now and Then deserves to be considered in the same class as the finest work the band produced. Nothing can ever shake the emotional pull of the Beatles’ canon, but as an adjunct to their greatest hits, it is a greatest hit itself. As one fan said, having just heard the song premier on Radio 2, “I’m only in my mid-thirties but the Beatles were a massive part of my childhood with my parents listening to them, and now this new song. I’m in tears, it sounds so haunting yet so beautiful.”
The chatter about the quality of the production is interesting, as it’s purely the result of technological advances; as the record is a composite – a labyrinthine one at that – so everyone feels they have the right to notionally produce it themselves. No one questions the production of Lucy in The Sky with Diamonds, say, or Norwegian Wood, because that’s what they sound like. Similarly, as Now and Then has been built like a digital jigsaw, so we all feel we have the right to say, deep breath, it would have sounded better if they had a) double tracked John Lennon’s voice, b) made the acoustic guitar less intrusive, or c) been more mindful of the If I Fell key change. But it is what it is, and what it is, is very, very good indeed.
Of course there have been professional naysayers – The Telegraph’s wearisome
