It’s been a long and winding road to get to the release of “Now and Then,” the latest reunion single by The Beatles, finally released over a quarter of a century after Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr first began working with a John Lennon demo that his widow, Yoko Ono, had given to them. In fact, to get to the start of the journey, you have to go back over another quarter of a century, to a time when The Beatles were still a working entity and the project that would eventually evolve into The Beatles Anthology was first coming together.
It was in 1968 that Denis O’Dell, the head of Apple Films (part of The Beatles’ Apple Corps. empire), began collecting film footage of the group from around the world for a documentary that would tell the band’s story. Neil Aspinall, Apple’s general manager, eventually took over the project, which was given the provisional title The Long and Winding Road. In early 1970, it was announced that both Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road would be released later in the year. Let It Be was duly released in May. But though the fan magazine The Beatles Book reported as late as October 1970 that The Long and Winding Road would be released in time for Christmas, the film failed to appear.
Two years later, in November 1972, there was another announcement of the film’s imminent release, this time under the unimaginative title Ten Years in the Life of The Beatles. But again, the film remained unreleased. Instead, it sank into a kind of limbo. Lennon would make reference to it in interviews (it was now back to being called The Long and Winding Road ). It was said that Harrison gave a copy of Aspinall’s rough cut to Eric Idle to use as a reference for his 1978 Beatles parody film All You Need Is Cash (more commonly known as The Rutles). And on November 28, 1980, Lennon mentioned the documentary again, this time in a deposition regarding Apple’s lawsuit against the producers of the tribute show Beatlemania, saying, “I and the three other former Beatles have plans to stage a reunion concert, an event to be filmed and included as the finale to The Long and Winding Road.”
After Lennon’s death, the film was shelved for a decade. But in 1990, Aspinall, now Apple’s CEO, suggested to the remaining Beatles and Ono (representing Lennon’s estate) that they revisit the project, and work on the film began again in 1992. The project had now evolved from a single film to a television series, with expanded video (and later DVD) releases to follow. Harrison insisted on a name change, The Long and Winding Road being too associated with McCartney’s song of that name. It was decided that The Beatles Anthology was safely neutral.
Initially, no tie-in record release was
