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“One-two,” goes the croaky count-in.
It’s an echo of track one, side one of the first Beatles album 60 years ago, but with two beats of whispery absence where the “three-four” should be. Simple, witty and so sad it hurts. Now And Then, the so-called “last Beatles’ song”, knows its place in the world.
Called ‘Now And Then’, the song has been 45 years in the making – with the first bars written by John Lennon in 1978 and the song finally completed last year.
In sound recording terms, it’s a world unrecognisable from the thrilling urgency of I Saw Her Standing There.
Then, it was all about catching lightning in a bottle as four hungry kids plugged in, eyeballed each other across the room and smashed it out live, like they did on the Reeperbahn.
Now? George Harrison’s strummed acoustic guitar hails from 1995, Paul McCartney’s plangent piano chords and Ringo Starr’s snapping rimshots from 2022. And it’s John Lennon – spirited in from a ropey late-1970s demo via Peter Jackson’s 21st Century digital clean-up algorithm – who owns it. His voice. His song. His words and, crucially, his mood.
On those terms, Now And Then is cut from the same cloth as the other two Beatles songs salvaged from the famous cassette bequeathed by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, in 1994.
Like Free As A Bird and Real Love, it was conceived by a “househusband” singing to himself at an upright piano, introspection and melancholy hardwired to its unmistakably modulating chords.
In terms of the band’s original arc, the effect is to place all three songs in the vaguely delirious mid-1960s zone where Rain bled into A Day In The Life, the other three players dutifully following their increasingly self-absorbed leader into a solitary realm of psychedelic detachment.
Now And Then is the most insistently minor-key of the three posthumous songs to date, and structurally the least surprising in this version, with Lennon’s original ‘I don’t wanna lose you’ bridge on the cutting room floor, reducing five meandering minutes to just over four.
McCartney’s playful bass flourishes at the end of each verse injecting a note of humour, and the solo he plays “in the style of” George Harrison gallantly aims for blue skies, even if it mostly manages, by accident or design, to emphasise his more flamboyant comrade’s absence.
The mysterious cassette tape, projected onto the wall of the Cavern Club next to John Lennon’s statue, to promote the release of ‘Now And Then’.
Fair play to Macca for keeping his thumbs up. The strings, too, arranged with George Martin’s son Giles, inject a certain rosy nostalgia. But lyrically, there’s not much here to hang them on. “And if I make it through,” Lennon sings wanly, seeming to doubt it even then, “it’s all because of you.”
Coming from a songwriter whose “I” always meant “me”, we can only hear a terrible foreshadowing where the classic uplift into the chorus should be.
Which isn’t to say that Harrison was right when he called this one “rubbish” after giving his seal of approval to Free As A Bird and Real Love nearly 30 years ago. His widow and son, Olivia and Dhani, have endorsed the party line that both departed Beatles would have been well on board, now that technology has caught up with intention.
They may well be right. It’s just another Beatles song, after all. It might stand out like the new kid at school on the imminent Blue Album compilation album (1967-1970), but even there, it will be as far from their worst as it is from their best.
In another 60 years, they’ll all sound the same: four guys from another world, trying to make sense of it all three-and-a-half minutes at a time.
By that time, of course, the idea of the “last Beatles’ song” will be purely academic. The Beatles will be everywhere, atomised by artificial intelligence systems into infinite permutations of songs for a marketplace that can barely conceive of records made by people plugging into gizmos, rolling something called “tape”, locking eyes across a room and counting “one-two-three-four.”
For that reason, maybe this one is kinda special after all.
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