Why George Harrison originally blocked the upcoming final Beatles single: “fucking rubbish”
With a little help from AI technology, the final single by The Beatles, ‘Now and Then’, is finally set to be released. It’s been over 50 years since the final Beatles session took place for ‘I Me Mine’ and even longer since all four Beatles were in the same studio at the same time mixing the Abbey Road track ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. But here we are, with only half the band intact and five decades removed from the final official Beatles album, the general public suddenly has new Beatles music.
A quick look under the hood reveals that ‘Now and Then’ isn’t actually very “new” at all. Originally recorded by John Lennon as a home demo in 1979, the song was one of a few tracks that the remaining Beatles attempted to restore and re-record during the Anthology project back in 1995. The process of taking Lennon’s unfinished demos and sprucing them up with overdubs and newly-recorded sections worked well on ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, but ‘Now and Then’ was trickier to figure out.
Specifically, the tape hiss from Lennon’s cassette tape recording was impossible to eliminate back in 1995. The remaining Beatles attempted to clean up ‘Now and Then’, originally titled ‘I Don’t Want To Lose You’ by Lennon, but they made little progress.
“It was one day – one afternoon, really – messing with it,” producer Jeff Lynne claimed in 1995, later reprinted by The Daily Express in 2007. “The song had a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really didn’t finish. It was sort of a bluesy sort of ballad, I suppose, in A minor. It was a very sweet song; I liked it a lot, and I wished we could have finished it.”
“It didn’t have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking,” McCartney said at the time. “It had a beautiful verse and it had John singing on it. But George didn’t want to do it. The best thing about it all was to work with John again. Hearing him in the headphones, it was like he was in the next room. It’s like an impossible dream.”
According to that same article, an anonymous source from the sessions claimed that Harrison was the one who ultimately ended the progress of ‘Now and Then’. “George just didn’t want to rework it because it’s not a matter of putting some vocals, or a bit of bass and drums to finish it. With this, you have to really build the song,” the source claimed. “The genius of The Beatles was predicated upon Lennon and McCartney. What was normal in the early days at least was that John would come in with a fragment and Paul would turn it into a hit – or vice versa.”
McCartney eventually copped that it was Harrison who kept ‘Now and Then’ from being finished, with McCartney’s 2021 feature in The New Yorker claiming that Harrison said the original demo was “fucking rubbish”. He also reiterated in the 2012 BBC documentary Mr. Blue Sky: The Story of Jeff Lynne and ELO that Harrison “went off it” and progress stalled on ‘Now and Then’ from there.
However, Harrison’s widow Olivia set the record straight while discussing ‘Now and Then’ prior to its release in 2023. “Back in 1995, after several days in the studio working on the track, George felt the technical issues with the demo were insurmountable and concluded that it was not possible to finish the track to a high enough standard,” Harrison wrote. “If he were here today, Dhani and I know he would have whole-heartedly joined Paul and Ringo in completing the recording of ‘Now and Then.’”
Whatever the real case may be, ‘Now and Then’ was shelved in 1995. McCartney had been making sporadic attempts to finish the song over the years, but it was only once Peter Jackson showed McCartney the AI technology that helped clean up the audio for his 2021 docuseries The Beatles: Get Back that ‘Now and Then’ was fast-tracked to completion. Now, it’s simply a matter of hearing what the final Beatles single will sound like.
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