It’s billed as “the last Beatles song.” And now, 2023 has brought one of the most anticipated releases of their long and endlessly eventful history. The track, written and sung by John Lennon in the late ’70s, developed and worked on by Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, is now finally finished by Paul and Ringo over four decades later. “Now And Then” was released worldwide on November 2 and its brilliant music video—directed by Peter Jackson in his first foray into music video production—arrived the next day. It will undoubtedly melt your heart.
Jackson shared the video’s odyssey. “When Apple asked me, I was very reluctant. I thought my next few months would be a hell of a lot more fun if that tricky task was somebody else’s problem, and I could be like any other Beatles fan, enjoying the night-before-Christmas anticipation as the release of a new Beatles song and music video approached–in 1995, l loved the childlike excitement I felt as the release of ‘Free As A Bird’ was inching closer. I could have that experience once again – all I had to do was say no.
“My lifelong love of The Beatles collided into a wall of sheer terror at the thought of letting everyone down. This created intense insecurity in me because I’d never made a music video before, and was not able to imagine how I could even begin to create one for a band that broke up over 50 years ago, had never actually performed the song, and had half of its members no longer with us.
“I told Apple how the lack of suitable footage worried me. We’d need to use a lot of rare and unseen film, but there’s very little… Nothing at all seemed to exist showing Paul, George and Ringo working on ‘Now And Then’ in 1995… There’s not much footage of John in the mid-seventies when he wrote the demo… I grizzled about the lack of unseen Beatles footage from the ’60s … And they didn’t even shoot any footage showing Paul and Ringo working on the song [in 2022].
“A Beatles music video must have great Beatles footage at its core. There’s no way actors or CGI Beatles should be used. Every shot of The Beatles needed to be genuine.
“I knew The Beatles don’t take no for an answer if their minds are set on something, but they didn’t even wait for me to say no. I found myself swept along as they quickly addressed my concerns. Paul and Ringo shot footage of themselves performing and sent that to me. Apple unearthed over 14 hours of long forgotten film shot during the 1995 recording sessions, including several hours of Paul, George and Ringo working on ‘Now And Then,’ and gave all that to me. Sean [Ono Lennon] and Olivia [Harrison] found some great unseen home movie footage and sent that. To cap things off, a few precious seconds of The Beatles performing in their leather suits, the earliest known film of The Beatles and never seen before, was kindly supplied by Pete Best.”
First, here’s a 12-minute “Now And Then–The Last Beatles Song” documentary film, written and directed by Oliver Murray, which debuted on Nov. 1. The short film tells the story behind the last Beatles song, with exclusive footage and commentary from Paul, Ringo, George, Sean and Jackson.
Jackson continued: “Watching this footage completely changed the situation. I could see how a music video could be made. Actually, I found it far easier if I thought of it as making a short movie, so that’s what I did… My lack of confidence with music videos didn’t matter anymore if I wasn’t making one.
“Even so, I still had no solid vision for what this short film should be, so I turned to the song for guidance.
“After we had separated John’s voice on the demo tape over a year ago, Giles [Martin] had produced an early mix of “Now And Then.’ This had been sent to me back in 2022. I loved it. Since then I must have listened to ‘Now And Then’ over 50 times, purely for pleasure.
“Now I started listening to it intently for different reasons. I was hoping that ideas or inspiration for the short film would somehow float up from the music. And that began to happen. As I kept listening, it felt like the song was creating ideas and images that started forming in my head. without any conscious effort from me.
Jackson skillfully blends footage of the four Beatles at different eras in their career, while often paired individually with their younger selves. At the clip’s most poignant moments, the present day Paul and Ringo are seen performing their parts for the song “together” with the much younger John and George.
“I teamed up with Jabez Olssen, my Get Back editor,” said Jackson, “to try and figure ways the new film footage could be used to support these wispy ideas. It was a very organic process, and we slowly started build little fragments, sliding pictures and music around in different ways until things began to click in.
“We wanted the short film to bring a few tears to the eye, but generating emotion using only archive footage is a tricky thing. Fortunately, the simple power of this beautiful song did a lot of the work for us, and we finished the first 30 or 40 secs of the film fairly quickly.
“Having done that, we jumped straight to the ending and tried to craft something that could adequately sum up the enormity of The Beatles’ legacy–in the last few seconds of their final recording. This proved to be impossible. Their contribution to the world is too immense, and their wondrous gift of music has become part of our DNA and now defies description.
“I realized we needed the imagination of every viewer to do what we couldn’t, and have each viewer create their own personal moment of farewell to The Beatles, but we had to gently steer everyone to that place. I had some vague ideas, but didn’t really know how to achieve this.
“Fortunately, Dhani Harrison happened to be visiting [New Zealand] at this time. I discussed the ending with him, and described one vague idea I’d been toying with. His eyes immediately filled with tears, so that is the way we went.
“Jabez and I now began thinking about the middle section. We could actually watch the beginning and end now, and quickly realized our initial plan of having similar emotional power continue through this middle section would be completely wrong. That was not who The Beatles were. At their core they were irreverent and funny, and the middle section should capture that spirit. We needed to laugh at The Beatles, and laugh with them. They were always sending themselves up. and the more seriously other people took them, the more they would clown around.
“Luckily we found a collection of unseen outtakes in the vault, where The Beatles are relaxed, funny and rather candid. These become the spine of our middle section, and we wove the humor into some footage shot in 2023. The result is pretty nutty and provided the video with much needed balance between the sad and the funny.”
As the clip ends, we see black-and-white images of the Beatles, individually, in their earliest days. And when the perfect final shot appears we once again see the four of them together on stage, so handsome in their stage suits. They take a final bow as their image slowly dissolves…
The song is available in a variety of single formats. It’s also been added—along with many other tracks—to an updated edition of The Beatles’ so-called “Blue” album, 1967-1970. That title, and its “Red” counterpart, 1962-1966, are being upgraded and expanded for a Nov. 10 release. More details are here.
Pre-order 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 (2023 Editions): 180-gram 6-LP set (U.S. and U.K.); 180g 3-LP black vinyl Red (U.S. and U.K.); 3-LP black vinyl Blue (U.S. and U.K.); 2-CD Red (U.S. and U.K.); 2-CD Blue (U.S. and U.K.).
