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Now and Then – ‘the last Beatles song’, as the promo keeps putting it – is here. The vibe is one of solemn wistfulness. The story is over. We’re sorry but it’s time to go. It’s getting very near the end.
It works very neatly too, a sighing coda to both the band’s career and to Lennon’s assassination. Hearing a 37-year-old John Lennon and an 81-year-old Paul McCartney sing together again is powerful without being maudlin or uncanny. The extra layers of meaning that have settled on ‘Now and Then’ since three surviving Beatles shelved it in the mid-Nineties have been mined pretty thoroughly.
“All of those memories come flooding back,” says McCartney in the documentary which came out on Wednesday. “My god, how lucky was I to have those men in my life, and to work with those men so intimately, and to come up with such a body of music.”
And musically, that’s what ‘Now and Then’ feels like. It’s tastefully done. There are flashes of other Beatles moments, like a flip-book of memories: a little guitar lick echoes ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’. Harmonies from ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘Because’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ float behind the chorus. McCartney and Giles Martin’s strings swirl between ‘Something’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’.
It could all be a bit morbid. There is, though, something else going on here which takes this sad song and makes it better. Even by the usual standards, we’re in a very Beatley Q4. There’s the ‘Now and Then’ push with the short doc and Peter Jackson’s video, plus expanded, remixed reissues of the much-loved career-spanning Red and Blue compilations from 1973. There’s also a new biography of the band’s roadie-helper-vibesman Mal Evans which draws on what Beatles fans have long considered the holy grail: the day-by-day diary Evans kept while at the very centre of the hurricane.
That follows Paul McCartney’s blockbuster Beatlemania-era photo exhibition which reopened the National Portrait Gallery after its three-year hibernation and a Macca podcast telling the stories behind some of his hits. (Given how little guitar George recorded in 1995, and how Ringo only did a couple of passes at a drum track before knocking off to take more pictures of his toes, you could be forgiven for thinking ‘Now and Then’ was the peak of a post-Glastonbury Paul-fest.)
The Beatles did final statements very well, and ‘Now and Then’ is a particularly poignant one: “Now and then, I miss you / Oh, now and then I want you to be there for me / Always to return to me.”
Their first final statement, Abbey Road, tied things off with a bow: drum solo, duelling guitar solos, and the couplet “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” Then it kept coming back around; after Lennon’s death in 1980, Harrison and McCartney semi-regularly dipped into their past, paying tribute to their mate or casting a wry eye over the whole Beatle thing. (I can’t think of another band where the members have had hits with songs specifically about the band they used to be in: Harrison had three on his own.) Then after the Anthology project, for which ‘Now and Then’ was originally worked on, Ringo made the call. And now here we are again. The gnomic statement the Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor made after the split still feels apt. “The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you,” he wrote. “When the spinning stops – that’ll be the time to worry. Not before.”
That’s been a bit of a theme in the extended Beatles universe since the start. There are a lot of freaky coincidences. The first and last pictures of the four of them together were taken exactly seven years apart. Paul McCartney wrote ‘She’s Leaving Home’ after reading a newspaper article about a young runaway whose parents pleaded with to return; unknown to him, McCartney had met her three years before. The band started a quasi-record company called Apple; John Lennon married Japanese conceptual artist Yoko Ono; the Japanese word for ‘apple’ is ‘ringo’. Both ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, the opening song on their first album, and ‘Now and Then’, their last, start with McCartney’s one-two-three-four.
One of the biggest weird time-space wrinkles to break the Beatles’ way is their arc from heading to Hamburg’s sweatboxes as kids in August 1960 – George Harrison was still 17, and he got deported for it – to McCartney’s announcement of the band’s disintegration in April 1970. It’s several lifetimes’ worth of stuff crammed into a neat decade. As soon as you finish one round of anniversaries, it’s time to start all over again.
And despite billing ‘Now and Then’ as the full stop, there’s no intention of letting their world stop spinning. Listen to the single on Spotify, and ‘Now and Then’ leads straight into the newly remixed version of their first single ‘Love Me Do’, which sounds newly moody and thumping. It’s a neat mirror of the new song’s title, and it points the way ahead.
The ‘Now and Then’ single sounds like an ending, but it’s introduced a load of younger people to the mid-Nineties reunion and the stories around that, and to vignettes which add to what ‘Now and Then’ is. There are TikToks laying out how Lennon left a tape marked ‘For Paul’ with a few songs on, and about the time Carl Perkins accidentally made McCartney cry by playing a song of Perkins’ own which unwittingly quoted Lennon’s final words to McCartney: “Think about me now and then, old friend.”
That’s where much of the Beatles story lives now. It’s in the Gen Z fans who are doing what they do with their other heroes. They make fancams, swap theories, some ship John and Paul. (Please: don’t go down the McLennon rabbit hole.) Most importantly, though, they induct new fans into the lore. I spoke to a 20-year-old fan from London a few months ago about why she loved the Beatles.
“It’s almost like something out of a novel,” she said. “There’s so many beautiful parts of their story, and heartbreaking parts as well, so it’s very easy to become invested in that.”
The stories and the lore are what really sticks. There is now a generation of young Beatles fans who were around to hear the premiere of a new Beatles song, a full generation on from the last one. Add that to the funny, self-aware, vibrant, still-modern people Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr all felt like in Jackson’s Get Back documentary, and it’s like a brand new version of the Beatles has been remade in the last two years. The spiky, sour feeling that occasionally flared up between the Beatles has been replaced by something far more open, tactile and strikingly 2023.
That in itself is an impressive feat, and is perhaps the one which has made them not just respected but loved all over again. ‘Now and Then’ might sound like an ending. But even now, the Beatles still don’t really want to stop the show.
