Technology has managed to bring John Lennon's voice and George Harrison's guitar back to life in Now and Then, which is presented as The Beatles' "last song" and which will be released this Thursday. In a short documentary released this Wednesday through the band's YouTube page, the band's living members, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, reveal how they managed to clean Lennon's voice from an unfinished demo tape recorded by him in his apartment. In New York.
Now and then will appear today thanks largely to the work that New Zealand director Peter Jackson and his technical team, authors of the documentary Get Back with real images of the recording of the Beatles' last album, did with an old Lennon cassette
In 1980, after Lennon's murder in the Dakota building in New York, "we really knew that this was over," says McCartney in the film released today. However, in 1994, "surprisingly, an interesting opportunity arose to be able to make other music again," and the three members then alive met up to recover songs that had not made it to the studio.
"If the three of us were going to make music again, including John was the obvious thing. I was talking to Yoko and she said, 'Oh, I think I have a tape of John,'" George Harrison then said, as the film recalls. They recorded Free as a Bird and Real Love, and began to do the same with Now and Then, but the piano ate up Lennon's voice and there was no way to separate them, which meant that the song "was put away in the closet in 1995." ", according to McCartney.
Harrison's death in 2001 took "the wind out of the Beatles' sails", but that did not prevent McCartney from seeing, almost a quarter of a century later, after the successful experience of Get Back, that advances now allowed them to recover. the old attempt. "Paul called me and told me he wanted to work on Now and Then. He did the bass and I did the drums," explains Starr, while guitar parts recorded by Harrison in 1995 were retained and string arrangements were added with some musicians from whom it was hidden that they were playing a piece by the Beatles.
Lennon's son, Sean, is convinced that his father, because of his innovative and experimental nature, would have loved the idea of cleaning his voice from an old cassette and releasing a new Beatles song. "Now and Then is probably the last Beatles song. We all worked on it, it's genuinely a Beatles recording," says McCartney.
