The Beatles: Now and Then review – ‘final’ song is a poignant act of closure

(Apple)
Lennon’s demo was abandoned in the 90s due to technical difficulties. With a little help from AI – and subtle new vocals from Paul McCartney – it becomes an affecting tribute to the band’s bond

Last night, BBC One shifted its schedules to broadcast a film about the making of the “final” Beatles single, Now and Then. It was brief and rather moving, but it offered a tactfully bowdlerised version of events, understandably stepping around the parts of the story that might cause anyone to regard Now and Then with a wary eye. It talked about the surviving Beatles’ initial attempts to work up John Lennon’s late 70s demos in the mid-90s, but didn’t mention the slightly muted response the completed versions of Free as a Bird and Real Love received. It was the height of Britpop, the Beatles’ stock higher – and their influence on current music more obvious – than at any point since their split. And yet Free as a Bird – clearly released with the intention of bagging the Christmas No 1 spot, as the Beatles regularly did in the 60s – couldn’t dislodge Michael Jackson’s Earth Song from the top: by its second week in the charts, it was being outsold not just by Jackson, but Boyzone’s cover of Cat Stevens’ Father and Son.

Real Love, meanwhile, managed a couple of weeks in the Top 10 before disappearing (by week two, Boyzone were outselling that as well). Perhaps it was stymied by Radio 1’s disinclination to play it, which led Paul McCartney to pen an angry article in the Daily Mirror, decrying the station’s “kindergarten kings”: whatever your take on the issue, there was something a bit unedifying about the Beatles’ return ending with Macca fulminating about Radio 1’s ageism à la Status Quo. Moreover, the overdubbed recordings had an eerie, uncanny valley quality. Everyone involved had clearly done their best with the technology available but there was no getting around the fact that Lennon’s voice sounded ghostly.