John, Paul, George and Ringo. The Beatles have reunited again, with the help of Artificial Intelligence, in the video clip for the latest song by the legendary Liverpool band, titled Now and Then.
Guitars and a bass tuning, a cassette, a drum set and Ringo Starr clearing his throat are a good prelude to the "one, two, three" that begins the first chords of the song, those that came from a batch of unreleased demos written by John Lennon in the 1970s.
Four decades after his murder, Lennon's voice stands out in the first verses. "I know it's true / It's all thanks to you / And if I make it / It's all thanks to you" is heard while George Harrison, who died in 2001, accompanies him by scratching the strings of his acoustic guitar again.
The voice and images are old, nostalgic, until the octogenarian Paul McCartney (born in 1942) appears on stage to provide the first choruses. The Impossible Song, the only original Beatles recording of the 21st century, has begun the first seconds of its more than four-minute duration.
The video clip, the work of Peter Jackson, who already directed the documentary Get Back (2021), is a review in images of the band's career. From time to time, you get so lost in the photos and AI animations that you even forget the melody.
Yoko Ono was the one who gave the recordings to Lennon's former colleagues. From those tapes came Free As a Bird and Real Love, released in the mid-1990s. But there were technical limitations in extracting this last song.
Lennon's voice was hidden and the piano was “difficult to hear,” as Paul McCartney has described. "And in those days (in the '90s), of course, we didn't have the technology to do the separation," he added.
"We're actually playing with cutting-edge technology, which is something the Beatles would have been very interested in," says Ringo Starr. "This is the last song you'll have all four Beatles on. John, Paul, George and Ringo," he continued.
McCartney and Starr built the song around Lennon's demo, adding guitar parts that George Harrison wrote in the 1995 sessions and providing contributions on bass and drums.
The music video for Now and Then has been created using footage that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr took of themselves performing now and during recording sessions in the mid-nineties.
Peter Jackson has also used "never-before-seen home movie footage provided by Lennon and Yoko Ono's son, Sean, and Olivia Harrison, George's wife. And includes a few precious seconds of The Beatles performing in their leather suits in The Cavern, provided by Pete Best, the band's original drummer.
"The result is pretty crazy and gave the video a much-needed balance between sad and funny," Jackson says. Perhaps one of the most overwhelming moments is when the elderly McCartney and Starr are reunited on screen with a Lennon in his late thirties and a mustachioed Harrison dressed in a lilac and violet suit.
"Oh now and then / I want you to be there for me / to always come back to me." And as it could not be otherwise, the late members of The Beatles reappear with the unmistakable suits with which they broke all schemes in their celebrated Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
An orchestra helped in the final interpretation of the song. And the madness. Lennon directing the musicians while Harrison and two McCartneys (the young one and the old one) look at him from the mixing room. Everything mixes. Yesterday, today, past, present, life, death. While the Beatles continue to touch hearts with their music.
