It almost resembles 1963 more than 2023, as fans pack into a Liverpool record shop in the early hours of Friday morning to buy a new Beatles single that went on sale at midnight. Incredibly, first in the line at HMV to buy Now and Then on 7in and 12in is none other than John Lennon – his real name, and he has the passport to prove it. “I started queueing at 8am Thursday,” he says, wearing the same round sunglasses and “New York City” T-shirt as his legendary namesake. “I was determined to be first.”
Behind him is Brian Jackson, 62, who runs Liverpool record/memorabilia shop Allkinds and has been a fan since he was four: “Our family used to play Beatles’ records on a Dansette. It’s never left me.” Some fans recognise the historic nature of the occasion. “I want to tell my children and my grandchildren that I bought a Beatles record on the day of release,” said Ved Desai, 19, a student from Dubai. Lizzie Hillesdon, who performs as singer Pixey, says the single reminds her of the White Album. Further down the queue, 22-year-old student Jackie Oien first heard Now and Then hours earlier at a listening party in the Cavern club. “Some people were teary,” she said. “It’s an emotional day for Liverpool.”
The song originates from a demo John Lennon recorded at home in New York’s Dakota building two years before he was murdered there in 1980. Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono handed the tape – along with demos of Real Love and Free As a Bird – to the remaining Beatles in 1994, but while completed versions of those songs reached No 2 and No 4 in 1995 and 1996 respectively, technical problems meant Now and Then was abandoned. Then George Harrison – who frustratedly declared the song “fucking rubbish” – died in 2001.
Recently, though, the AI technology that Peter Jackson used on 2021 Beatles documentary Get Back enabled Lennon’s vocal to be isolated, allowing the song to be finished by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. As well as including Harrison’s 1995 guitar parts with the blessing of his widow, Olivia, McCartney plays a beautiful slide guitar solo in the style of his late bandmate, while Giles Martin – son of Beatles producer Sir George – worked up a Beatle-y strings arrangement, just as his father would have done in the 1960s.
“To my ears, it sounds like a John Lennon song that could have been on his last albums,” said Dr Holly Tessler, who runs a master’s programme on the Beatles at the University of Liverpool. “However, it’s a John song that they’ve improved on. I’ve talked to people who’ve said ‘It’s not a Beatles song’ but it’s John, Paul, George and Ringo singing and playing – so what is that if not the Beatles?”
A 12-minute making-of film aired the day before release, combining historical footage with film of the surviving Beatles working on Now and Then in 1995 and more recently. “To be told by Paul ‘This is definitely the last Beatles song’ felt like a seismic shift to me,” said director Oliver Murray. “It’s a full stop on the catalogue, but the legacy will go on.” Although marking what he calls “a key moment in history”, there’s an emotional element to his film, not least when Lennon’s isolated vocal is heard, prompting Starr to comment: “It was the closest we’ll come to having him back in the room.”
“It was very emotional for Paul and Ringo,” Murray said. “Paul had had an opportunity to make music with his friend again. They had a brotherly bond between four people, and technology has been used to enable it again. Paul has said that the last words John said to him were ‘Think of me now and then, old friend’, and the song has this beautiful poignancy which seems appropriate somehow.”
For Tessler, the song’s melancholy atmosphere reflects songwriter Lennon’s thoughts at that point in his life.
“He’d just got back with Yoko, and if you listen to the lyrics it’s overtly about her, but there’s at least a few lines in the second verse which could be read to allude to his relationship with Paul McCartney. Which adds another layer of poignancy: could they have got back together?
“Now it’s the work of two 80-something men in their twilight years working on this song with two comrades, one of whom was murdered and one [Harrison] who died a horrible death from cancer. It gives everybody an opportunity to say goodbye to them properly, without all the acrimony of the breakup in 1970. It brings the Beatles as a group to a much more gentle, lovely and very poignant place.”
Queuing at HMV, 18-year-old University of Liverpool student Xander Steel agreed: “I’ve heard the song 10 times already and it’s a really good sendoff.”