Let It Be: Why ‘Now and Then’ must be the Beatles swansong

The track’s principal purpose seems to be to keep The Beatles in our minds, to maintain their status as the undisputed heavyweight pop champions of the world by dint of endless resissues and repackages. It’s time to agree we’ve reached the end of the long and winding road, says Michael Hann

(Apple Corps Ltd)

The other week I was listening to Say You Will, the final studio album by Fleetwood Mac. It’s pretty good – decent songs, exceptional production, great playing – but it never really sounds like a Fleetwood Mac album. And that’s because it wasn’t a Fleetwood Mac album: it was two solo albums by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, with the members of Fleetwood Mac playing on them (barely a quarter of the 18 songs on Say You Will were written specifically for the record).

It’s the same feeling I have listening to “Now and Then”, the newly released absolutely-last-no-we’re-never-going-to-do-this-again single by The Beatles. Yes, it has all four Beatles playing on it: there are fragments of John Lennon vocals plus a bit of guitar recorded by George Harrison back in 1994 when the group had their first bash at reviving the song from an old Lennon demo. The donkey work, though, is done by Paul McCartney, with Ringo Starr adding drums.

“The way our four different personalities combined in The Beatles was really something very special,” McCartney says in the short film released to promote the song. There’s the nub of it all: “Now and Then” doesn’t sound like four different personalities combining. Instead, it sounds like a band imitating The Beatles, in the way that a lot of Beatles-y music does – the mid-paced piano chords, the sombre melody, the slide guitar solo (played by McCartney, modelled after Harrison), and the non-specific air of beatitude about it.