Today saw the release of the new documentary short entitled The Beatles: Now and Then – The Last Beatles Song on Disney+ and YouTube, and below are my thoughts.
When I was a teenager in the 90s, The Beatles Anthology docuseries and accompanying albums were released, and along with them came two new songs by The Beatles: “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” both written and demoed by John Lennon in the late 1970s before he was killed. Little did I know that there was a third Lennon song considered for these releases– “Now and Then,” which was abandoned due to the unusable audio mix of the demo recording and the lack of time and technology to bring it up to listenable standards in 1995. Enter The Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson, who helmed the excellent recent The Beatles: Get Back documentary miniseries for Disney+, and the technological wizards working for him. Using the same artificial intelligence programming that was utilized for the audio in Get Back, Jackson and his team were able to isolate John’s singing from the piano track in “Now and Then,” making it a viable option to release as the “last Beatles song,” with contributions from bassist Paul McCartney, drummer Ringo Starr, and the late lead guitarist George Harrison, of course. That’s the subject of the new short documentary The Beatles: Now and Then – The Last Beatles Song, directed by Oliver Murray of the Rolling Stones doc The Quiet One.
Clocking in at just 12 minutes in length, this short documentary is mostly about the tech that made the song possible, with the actual full song itself– and its video, directed by Jackson– coming later in the week. We hear from McCartney, Starr, Lennon’s son Sean, and Peter Jackson, plus clips of archival audio interviews with John Lennon and George Harrison, all of which play over footage of our favorite four lads from the 60s, the trio without Lennon in the 90s, and then last year’s recording session for “Now and Then.” It’s great seeing Paul and Ringo jamming out once again, and of course it’s bittersweet that John and George aren’t around to join them. But I was most interested in hearing this documentary’s rather positive take on A.I. and what the technology is capable of, especially after an extended period of it being demonized among Hollywood writers and actors. Of course A.I., like any technology, is capable of both good and bad things, but here Murray shows us how it was used to reunite The Beatles one last time, and who in their right mind would complain about that?
Watch The Beatles – Now And Then – The Last Beatles Song (Short Film):
The Beatles: Now and Then – The Last Beatles Song is now available to stream on Disney+. The “Now and Then” music video will premiere this Friday, November 3rd, via The Beatles’ official YouTube channel.