With the discharge of their first song in a long time, The Beatles have proven their music stays as relevant as ever — however the band’s two surviving members say they never imagined they’d have such longevity from its humble beginnings in Liverpool.
“None of us thought it might last every week!” drummer Ringo Starr, 83, told The Sunday Times of London.
“Paul was going to write down, I used to be going to open a hairdresser’s, George would get a garage,” he continued. “Nevertheless it went on after which it ended. And at the appropriate time, I feel. But, you already know, that didn’t stop us fidgeting with one another.”
The Beatles’ final track, “Now and Then,” was released on Thursday and had Beatles fans young and old melting.
The gorgeous, dramatic goodbye from the Fab 4 features John Lennon on vocals and George Harrison on guitar — despite the pair having been dead for a long time — because of the assistance of contemporary technology.
As they reflected on the past after releasing the song, Paul McCartney, 81, shared Starr’s incredulity at how The Beatles have endured as considered one of music’s hottest and beloved bands.
“After we began, we thought that, possibly, we’d have 10 years — that was the utmost span for a rock ‘n’ roll group,” McCartney told the Sunday Times.
While their estimation was roughly correct for the times The Beatles actually recorded together, their music has continued to captivate and encourage latest audiences for generations since they called it quits.
“Now and Then” has existed in its crudest form since 1977, when Lennon tape-recorded a rough draft of the song while playing piano in his apartment on the Dakota on Latest York City’s Upper West Side — where he could be murdered two years later.
Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, told the remaining band members that she still had considered one of his old demo tapes within the Nineties.
McCartney, Harrison and Starr took their first stab at using Lennon’s tape recording as the premise for a latest Beatles song.
Harrison’s guitar parts were recorded in 1995. He died of cancer in 2001.
But as a consequence of technological limitations on the time, the band was unable to tear Lennon’s muffled voice from the piano within the rough recording, so the project was shelved.
Nonetheless, it was revisited recently by director Peter Jackson, who made HBO’s 2021 Beatles documentary “Get Back.” Using state-of-the-art equipment, he was capable of split the parts and make the brand new recording possible. The Oscar-winner also released a video to accompany the historic track.
McCartney and Starr each recorded latest parts on their respective instruments and a string section added a layer of depth to Lennon’s song.
“It’s strange when you concentrate on it,” McCartney told the outlet. “There’s John, in his apartment, banging away at a piano doing a demo. And now we’ve restored it and it’s a crystal-clear, beautiful vocal.
“You continue to wonder, is it inferior, something we shouldn’t do? But each time I assumed that, I assumed, ‘Let’s say I had a likelihood to ask John.’ And John would have loved it. After all, I’m never going to know, but I feel mine’s the perfect guess we will have,” he continued.
“And now it’s a Beatles record. After we played it to people, some cried, some said, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s a Beatles record!’ ”
