No Frills Reviews

With the help of AI, The Fab Four get back together one last time and it’s…ok

I’ll briefly fill you in on the backstory in case you’ve managed to avoid any of the news around this. The then three remaining Beatles got together in the 90’s to work on some of John Lennon’s home demo recordings from the late 70’s, provided by Yoko Ono. Now And Then was one of the songs, but they struggled to complete it due to the quality of the recording, with Lennon’s voice drowned out by piano and tape hiss.

Fast forward almost 30 years, and the now two remaining Beatles reconvene (at least virtually), inspired by Peter Jackson’s 2021 Get Back documentary series. The technology used for that series allowed the various component parts of the audio to be separated and isolated. McCartney saw the opportunity to apply that here and finally finish the song.

For those fearing what part AI played, that’s really all there is to it (skipping over the technical detail behind it). This isn’t the gimmicky shit that will conjure up a Drake song for you or give you Johnny Cash singing Taylor Swift. There’s no words being put into John Lennon’s mouth, this is actually him. The AI is essentially rescuing his voice from the unwanted noise it got lost in. It’s another evolution in studio experimentation and The Beatles were no stranger to that. It feels about as tasteful as a posthumous release can ever really be. For a bit more of the backstory check out the short documentary below.

Now I’m not just doing the boring contrarian thing – I love The Beatles – but let’s allow some nuance because there are negatives. Firstly, the artwork is dogshit, proper Photoshop preset vibes. The official video is also appalling (see below). Really cheap-looking stuff; superimposing people into scenes has never not looked terrible. And the b-side – a new mix of their debut single, Love Me Do – is poor, managing to sap most of the life from the original. There’s just a real sense of half-arsedness to everything surrounding it; Paul and Ringo haven’t even bothered being in the same place (more understandable for George and John).

What about the actual song though? Well, again, I’m gonna start with the negatives. My first impression was that this could be from latter day Oasis or a Liam solo album. It’s plodding in parts and kinda manages to sound like an imitation of what a Lennon song should sound like. There’s some sort of ironic symmetry in that though: The Beatles becoming an Oasis soundalike a quarter of a century from their heyday.

As polished as the production is, it still feels unfinished. They had a couple of verses and choruses worth of material from Lennon, but they’ve decided to stretch it out over 4 minutes, without anything interesting enough happening to justify the 90 seconds on the end.

And perhaps my hottest take is that some of the Lennon vocal is a bit crap. Lennon at his worst could slip into an annoying whine and that happens a couple of times here. Many of his less talented imitators over the years have fell into the trap of replicating that aspect of his voice, which makes it a bit of a bugbear of mine. You know the one; where ‘you’ gets elongated to ‘yewwww’.

Now, for all my negativity, it’s still the fucking Beatles. The lyrics border on overly sentimental, but let’s not pretend The Beatles weren’t capable of over-sentimentality…and they were great at it. Despite the couple of bum notes, Lennon’s voice is mostly classic Lennon; tender yet strained, vulnerable yet authoritative. While you barely get a whisper of McCartney, it’s also unmistakably McCartney. When those melodies hit on the chorus, you can’t help but feel something. Harrison’s slide guitar is suitably melancholic (albeit it’s a re-creation by Paul). And Ringo’s there being absolutely ok on drums.

Whether it’s the finished article or not, to have all of The Beatles doing classic Beatles things on a new song one last time has a certain poignancy to it. And it’s a better finale than those shite 90’s tunes.

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