Ahead of the official release of their final song ‘Now and Then’ on November 2nd, The Beatles have shared a short film exploring the history and making of the track.
The 12-minute film, titled Now And Then – The Last Beatles Song, features contributions from Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Sean Ono Lennon, and Peter Jackson. They explain how the technology they discovered while making the Get Back documentary allowed them to finally complete the recording of ‘Now and Then’. The new video has been written and directed by British director Oliver Murray.
Murray’s film relies on archival footage with added voiceovers. Some of the scenes had been previously seen in Jackson’s impressive Disney+ documentary series Get Back, and there are clips from when The Beatles previously tried to record ‘Now and Then’ as part of their Anthology project in 1995.
During their last attempts at making ‘Now and Then’, The Beatles aborted their plans due to technology issues. In Now And Then – The Last Beatles Song, Ringo reflected: “It really brought to the four, to the three of us that John’s gone.”
Meanwhile, McCartney says: “I think we kind of ran out of steam a bit and time. It was like, ‘Maybe we’ll leave this one’.” He also discusses the death of George Harrison in 2001 as another reason why it’s taken so long for the track to reach completion, noting how his passing “took the wind out of our sails”.
He adds: “It took us almost a quarter of a century to wait for the right moment to tackle ‘Now and Then’ again. With the technology that Peter Jackson and his team had worked out during the Get Back movie, he’d been able to separate off certain instruments and voices.”
Jackson elaborates: “During the course of Get Back, we were paying a lot of attention to the technical restoration, which ultimately led us to develop a technology that allows us to take any soundtrack and split all the different components into separate tracks.”
Moreover, Ono Lennon said his father would have “loved” the idea of using Jackson’s equipment as he was “never shy to experiment with recording technology” and described the process of making the song as “really beautiful”.
In addition to the release of ‘Now and Then’ on November 2nd, Jackson has used past footage of the band to create a brand new video for the track, which is set to arrive on November 3rd.
