“Making good music in a band is all about chemistry,” says Paul McCartney in these opening words of Now And Then – The Last Beatles Song, the new short documentary about the English quartet directed by Oliver Murray, which tells the band’s long journey in creating “Now And Then,” their final song.
The documentary, released yesterday on the band’s YouTube profile, precedes the release of the single scheduled for this afternoon (while we’ll have to wait until Friday for the video directed by Peter Jackson).
“Now And Then” has a 44-year history. John Lennon recorded a demo of it in 1977, which Yoko Ono gifted to his bandmates after his passing. In 1995, Harrison added some guitar parts to it, but the technology wasn’t advanced enough to fully recover Lennon’s recorded vocals from the tape. It’s only thanks to a new technology developed by Peter Jackson (used in the documentary “The Beatles: Get Back”) that technicians managed to isolate Lennon’s vocals, allowing Paul and Ringo to work on it.