The children of the 21st century are still listening to The Beatles

It’s more than half a century since The Beatles broke up, 43 years since John Lennon was murdered, and almost 22 since George Harrison passed to the next world, but in that time the Fab industry has been relentless, respectfully - mostly - but efficiently mining a legacy generated in those ten years between 1960 and 1970 when they were originally making music together.

Next Thursday we’ll get to hear what has been pitched as the band’s “final” recording with the release of Now And Then, an apparently lost demo that Lennon recorded onto a cassette at home in New York in 1977. In 1994, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono gave the tape to then-surviving Beatles Paul McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr, who were able to recover their bandmate’s voice from other demos, add their own and instruments, and release the songs Free As A Bird and Real Love as singles in 1995 and 1996, part of The Beatles Anthology project. 

Now And Then was also on the tape, but technical limitations at the time prevented Lennon’s vocals from being adequately recovered. But now, using the same AI technology Peter Jackson used to isolate dialogue in Get Back, his epic 2021 documentary series about the making of the Let It Be album, it will be released next week as “the last Beatles song”. It features Lennon’s original vocals from the tape, along with guitar added by Harrison in 1995 (before the project was abandoned in the belief that the track was unsalvageable). Last year, Starr recorded the drums with McCartney adding bass, guitar and piano. String arrangements from Eleanor Rigby, Because and Here, There And Everywhere were worked into the mix. 

The finished track will be officially made public next Thursday, with a full release on Friday. A 12-minute film - Now And Then - The Last Beatles Song - will premiere on The Beatles’ YouTube channel on Wednesday, telling the story of how the single came about.

There had been rumours for a while of an unreleased Beatles song coming out, and a rough version of Now And Then was said to be available online, but next week’s official release of the single commences a new wave of commercial activity for the Fabs, which will see fifth - and expanded - reissues of the legendary ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Beatles compilation albums, respectively covering 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, going on sale on 10 November (handily the day before my birthday... 😉). 

Originally released in April 1973, the new, improved and expanded editions of the albums will include Now And Then and comprise various packages, including a six-LP 180g vinyl option and a four-CD version. All 75 songs have been newly remixed in stereo by Giles (son of George) Martin and Sam Okell at Abbey Road using the ‘de-mixing’ technology used for the recent reissues of individual Beatles albums. Of course, with the exception of Now And Then, everything on the two albums will already reside in most Beatle fans’ record collections, but that won’t stop them being acquired again for some 35 extra tracks not included in previous releases, with greater inclusion from the Revolver, ‘White’, Abbey Road and Let It Be albums.

Of course, this is another cash grab by a band that, despite existing for that relatively brief ten-year period, and disbanding more than half a century ago, has become one of the most enduring franchises in entertainment. Which isn’t all that new: in 1964, their canny then-manager, Brian Epstein, negotiated a $10,000 fee for the band to make three appearances on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show. Even in 1964, that wasn’t a particularly large sum of money, but Epstein’s deal ensured that their US TV debut was seen by a record 73 million viewers, giving the band unprecedented commercial exposure and launching the ‘British Invasion’, from which they profited handsomely (though, you could argue, costing John Lennon his life just 16 years later).

Interviewed by CNBC a few years ago, former Philadelphia news anchor Larry Kane, who covered The Beatles on their 1964 and 1965 US tours, said the band could never have imagined how long - or how lucrative - their careers would turn out to be. “It was always a big question for them: when was the bubble going to burst? I don’t think they had any idea it would go on like this. I asked Brian Epstein in 1964 how long it would last. He said ‘Larry, the children of the 21st century will be listening to the Beatles.’ He was right.”

Experts will attribute this longevity to the fact that The Beatles were, to use marketingspeak, ‘first movers’, establishing their brand in a way matched only by the Rolling Stones. Following that Ed Sullivan debut, Gretsch and Rickenbacker guitars, as used by the band, flew out of American musical instrument shops, the start of an entire industry in replica Beatle ‘mop top’ wigs, collarless suits, Yellow Submarine toys - you name it. Now, however, we’re well used to bands manufactured for pure profit, but even if, in hindsight, The Beatles were the marketeer’s dream back in October 1962 when Love Me Do came out - four clean-cut young lads from working class Liverpool, singing simple songs about romance. When billboards started appearing in America saying “The Beatles are coming”,  a commercial phenomenon as powerful as Coca-Cola, Ford or McDonalds was about to be unleashed.

63 years after the group’s formation in Liverpool, global Beatlemania has never bitten the dust. The relentless re-releases, compilation albums, physical and multimedia projects and even the incredible Cirque du Soleil Love show in Las Vegas have not only kept the legacy alive, but the tills making money. In fact, taken as a whole, The Beatles’ financial impact continues to eclipse anything or anyone else the music industry has ever produced, with McCartney, Starr, and the estates of Lennon and Harrison, together with The Beatles’ holding company, finding myriad opportunities to leverage the Fab brand that were never available to the band when they were formally together.

The Beatles continue to be the biggest selling music act of all time. Data a decade ago put their total worldwide album sales at more than 600 million (177 million alone in the US, with Elvis Presley behind them on 135 million). Even in 1964 they made the equivalent of $188 million. Paul McCartney is today worth around £650 million, with Ringo Starr worth £247 million, by default making him the world’s wealthiest drummer (though compare this with Taylor Swift who, according to a Bloomberg report yesterday, has just become America’s first billionaire pop star by value).

It was, though, business that contributed to The Beatles’ original collapse as a band: Epstein’s death from an overdose in 1967 let to the organisation behind them entering a tailspin, even if the creativity relented. The year before, the exhausted band had famously given up touring in order to focus on the quality of their music, much to Epstein’s annoyance, who saw them cutting off their noses to spite their commercial teeth. 

Following his death, they lacked the business acumen to manage their finances. The Magical Mystery Tour film was a whimsically distracting box office dud, while the loss-making Apple Boutique took the quartet further into internecine sensitivity (Abbey Road’s You Never Give Me Your Money could well have been a boardroom comment). The looming denouement would come to a head in September 1969 when Lennon informed McCartney and Starr, amid discussions with businessman Allen Klein over renegotiating the band’s contract with EMI, that he was leaving. Just not straightaway. The following April, McCartney counter-announced that he was going to leave. Such discord, of course, is now long forgotten.

“It was the closest we’ll ever come to having [John] back in the room so it was very emotional for all of us,” the now 83-year-old Ringo Starr told journalists about their work on Now And Then. “It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.” McCartney - still considered by many The Beatle who broke up the band - was equally as emotional: “There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” he said of the AI-rendered production. “And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”

The world will have to wait until next Thursday to hear the song and judge for themselves whether it is a worthy addition to the Beatles canon, or just a sentimental paragraph in their lengthy history. It is, though, a history that shows little sign of ending. “Kids are listening today who never have seen Paul or me, they're into the music,” Ringo Starr  told USA Today a decade ago, and he’s still right. “The thing I’m most proud of is the music, not the haircuts. The music is it. That's what will last.”

He’s right. Contrarians will readily say that so-called ‘legacy’ acts like The Beatles are holding up the production line of new music, but I would counter by saying that their music is timeless and artistically classic. Shakespeare may have written his last play 400 years ago, but his work is as relevant and loved today as it was then. Perhaps pretentiously, I’d say The Beatles should be given the same consideration.

Tomorrow never knew

Ask anyone with an opinion on The Beatles to name their favourite Fab Four album and you will never get the same answer twice. One fan’s Sgt. Pepper is another’s Abbey Road; ‘The White Album’ can be interchanged with Rubber Soul; Help! for Let It Be, and so on.

By any measure, the band’s career arc - from their debut single Love Me Do, released 60 years ago this month, until Let It Be, their final record - is one of extraordinary evolution. In just eight years of recorded music - eight years! - they evolved from chirpsome arrival to the wearisome The Long And Winding Road. Between those points they more or less invented progressive rock. I don’t mean songs with interminable guitar solos about ancient myths written in obscure time signatures, but music that ignored the structural, lyrical and instrumentation conventions of pop that had been established by ‘beat music’ and the original infusions of jazz, blues, soul, country, folk and rock and roll that emerged from 1950s America.

The Beatles’ history is a compressed one. By their third album, A Hard Day’s Night, they had already introduced a harder edge to their infectious pop. By their sixth, 1965’s Rubber Soul, the pressures of relentless touring in their initial ascent found some release in their writing. Coinciding with their recreational introduction to LSD, the record - sometimes melancholy, sometimes whimsical - featured far greater experimentation, such as George Harrison’s use of a sitar on Norwegian Wood or a fuzzbox on Nowhere Man. Lyrically, too, the music was now less about young love and more about adult perspectives on life itself. Rubber Soul wasn’t so much the blueprint for what came next, but it demonstrated a clear desire to exceed the boundaries of conventional pop in the mid-60s.

On Wednesday 6 April, 1966, the greatest creative entity in the history of popular music entered Studio 3 of Abbey Road to commence work on their seventh album. It was to become the record that critics and fans alike would regard as the Looking Glass moment. It was Revolver. It would establish The Beatles as the pre-eminent studio band of their era. They would, of course, give up touring altogether that summer (on the back of the US tour on which John Lennon declared the band “more popular than Jesus,” a remark that didn’t go down well in the Bible Belt). But with the intention to withdraw into the studio already made, the 300 hours they would spend at Abbey Road making Revolver turned Studio 3 into their personal sandpit.

Although Revolver was recorded much as its six predecessors had been, with the band facing each other in a circle on the studio floor, recording ‘as-live’ straight to tape, it’s what came out of those sessions that was less than conventional. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the track that closes Revolver, Tomorrow Never Knows. The basics of it were recorded on that very first day at Abbey Road. Its reverse tape effects, droning background and one of Ringo Starr’s most idiosyncratic drum patterns made a clear statement, from the outset, that the Fabs were searching for alternative experiences, both musically and socially. Remarkably, just three years separate its opening line “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,” from She Loves You, placing down a marker for 1960s counter-culture. “We did [Tomorrow Never Knows] because I, for one, am sick of doing sounds that people can claim to have heard before,” Paul McCartney told the NME at the time the album came out. He could well have been talking about the entire record itself.

Today we get the chance to experience that magic all over again with its reissue as a ‘super-deluxe edition’, curated by Giles Martin, son of George, as he has done for Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles (AKA The White Album). Available in various packages, the reissue expands the original 14-track line-up with the customary phalanx of extras which, to some critics, provides further example of ‘heritage acts’ gouging the hopelessly devoted with baubles like studio outtakes and demos that were left on the cutting room floor in the first place for a reason. 

Revolver maybe the difference. If the exhaustive, engrossing Peter Jackson documentary Get Back demonstrated anything, it was opening the lid on the sometimes laborious work that The Beatles applied to writing their apparently simplistic, sometimes child-like songs, which in reality were anything but simple.

The Revolver reissue contains a brand new stereo mix of the original album produced by Martin and Sam Okell, and it is this that provides the centrepiece attraction. Remixes of classic albums - often by people like my friend Steven Wilson to produce ‘multi-channel’ surround sound versions - are designed to create a different aural experience to the original. Martin’s new Revolver mix cleverly lifts out instrumentation and the band’s individual contributions that had been buried in the original recording due to the fact that in 1966 studios didn’t have the seemingly endless multi-track capabilities they do today.

Revolver’s interest isn’t, however, just about The Beatles’ instrumental creativity taking on a new life, but also their songwriting freedom, too. A good example is the opening track, Taxman. Anchored by McCartney’s metronomic bassline (later borrowed wholesale by The Jam on Start!) it was a George Harrison song that made a dig at the-then government of Harold Wilson’s tax regime which saw the highest earners paying rates of 90%. It also set the tone of an album Giles Martin has described as “not very happy” lyrically, reflecting a band already growing wan with the adulation of Beatlemania. This continues with the wistful Eleanor Rigby, with its staccato, Hitchcockian strings painting a greying portrait of a lonely woman McCartney had encountered, drawing on the band’s growing interest in Indian culture to influence the orchestration.

Go through all 14 of Revolver’s tracks and you draw conclusions about where The Beatles were at in 1966. John Lennon’s I’m Only Sleeping is, according to Martin, “classic John” in that it expressed not the compliant, mop-topped pop star of Please Please Me, but the wry individual that became his public stock-in-trade. Equally, McCartney’s Here, There And Everywhere put down a further market of his trademark romanticism. The same can be said for Yellow Submarine, a Ringo Starr song born from a Lennon idea, and would go on to become the standard bearer for opinions of The Beatles that they were simply purveyors of ‘children’s music’. Be that as it may (and no long car journey in my childhood was complete without a sing-song of it) it’s a remarkable song for a pop act fast becoming a rock band to have committed to record. I can’t imagine David Bowie - another considered an originator of progressive rock - would have considered doing The Laughing Gnome if it wasn’t for the novelty of The Beatles getting away with Yellow Submarine.

Revolver isn’t so much of an invention that it’s without outside influences. Some, like The Kinks and The Who, closer to home, while others, like The Byrds, from further afield. Martin says that Lennon was a huge fan of the latter’s Roger McGuinn and his signature Rickenbacker guitar sound, to the extent that early demos of And Your Bird Can Sing were “almost too Byrdsy”. On the feelgood Good Day Sunshine and Got To Get You Into My Life, McCartney drew on more soulful influences, with Motown in particular making its mark.

But the track that stands out more than any other for its sheer singularity is the aforementioned Tomorrow Never Knows. “What’s extraordinary about this track is it’s the first thing they did for Revolver,” Martin recently told the NME, revealing that when they started recording the album, they’d just returned from their first holiday with a load of ideas. Paul, in particular, felt that they were becoming individuals. Discovering cannabis and other recreational diversions had helped. Lennon come into the studio saying “I’ve written this song, it’s just one chord, and I want it to sound like I’m in the Himalayas singing from a mountaintop”. Martin says that for his father, the somewhat urbane and straight-laced George, to go “alright, let’s go and do that” was “amazing”.

If Revolver has remained a landmark for the last 56 years, the expectation is that Martin’s work on it today will add dimensions not even imaginable with 1960s recording technology. That certainly seems to be the result of his new mixes. “People forget that it’s just a young band playing in the studio,” Martin recently told The Times. ”Everything is fairly aggressive. Everything is in your face. Everything The Beatles recorded is a little bit louder than you think it is.” 

There is, inevitably, a cabal of fans who regard Martin’s remixes to be acts of heresy, even undoing the groundbreaking his father did as ‘the fifth Beatle’ in the studio. “I kind of embrace them because, in a way, they’re absolutely right,” Martin said to The Times. But he also says that no one is compelling anyone to listen to the new mixes. But there is room for them. I personally enjoyed the revision of the Let It Be, which had originally been over-embellished by Phil Spector, when it was reissued as Let It Be Naked - stripped back and sounding more like a rock album should do as the 60s gave way to the 70s.

Martin says his work is, essentially, a form of time travel. You can argue whether it is needed. Some will be happy with their original copy of the album from 1966. But you don’t have to be a scholar of music to enjoy the experience of hearing one of the breakthrough albums of the rock and pop era though ‘new ears’, even if you need a healthy bank balance to afford it. It may even help conclude the debate on which Beatles album was their best. Because it probably is.