Beatles, the last dance?
- Om Dattani
- Sep 11, 2023
- 2 min read
Sir Paul McCarney (singer and songwriter) who was part of the infamous band, the Beatles, told reporters earlier this week that he has employed artificial intelligence to help create what he calls “the final Beatles record.”
In an interview call with the BBC radio 4’s today program, he said, “the technology has been used to “extricate” John Lennon’s voice from an old demo so he could complete the song”. He continued, “we just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” fantastic news for long-lived Beatles fans but also the uproar of millennial and Gen Z Beatles fans who were not part of their era.
According to a reputable source, Sir Paul did not name the song, the song is likely to be a 1978 Lennon composition called now and then. This suggestion popped up after it had already been considered as a possible “reunion song” for the Beatles in 1995, as they were compiling their career-spanning Anthology series.
Sir Paul received the demo of the song a year ago from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono. It was one of several songs on a cassette labelled “For Paul” that Lennon had made shortly before his assassination in 1980. With a Lo-fi and embryonic vibe, the tracks were recorded onto a boombox as the musician sat at a piano in his New York apartment.
According to the same source, the band also attempted to record Now and Then, an apologetic love song that was typical of Lennon’s later career, but the session was quickly abandoned. A close member to the band recalled “it was one day – one afternoon, really – messing with it” He continued, “the song had a chorus but it totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really did not finish.”
Sir Paul later claimed that George Harrison, the lead guitarist of the Beatles, refused to work on the song, saying the sound quality of Lennon’s vocal was “Rubbish.” In another interview to Q Magazine, he said, “It did not have a particularly good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it, however George did not like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we did not do it.”
It was said that the original song had technical issues recording, which featured a persistent “buzz” from the electricity circuits in Lennon’s apartment. A few years later, in 2009, the latest version of the demo, without the background noise, was released on CD. At that time fans speculated that this recording may not have been available in 1995, as it might have been stolen from his apartment, along with other personal artefacts, after his death.
In the consequent years, Sir Paul has repeatedly talked about his desire to finish the song and now with the rise of AI, this would be the perfect time to do so.
He told a BBC documentary on jeff Lynne in 2012 that “that one’s still lingering around” “So I am going to nick in with Jeff and do it. Finish it, one of these days.”
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