[crew member] Two, take one. Silent turnover.
- [George] Are you ready, Ringo? - [Paul] Come on. We're doing it. We're on.
- One. - Two.
- Three. - Four!
[John] Which key is it in, really?
- [Paul] Ringo. - [John] George is tuned up.
- [George] Oh, hi there. - [Paul] John.
- [John] I'm ready to sing for the world. - [crowd cheering]
[John] I hope we passed the audition.
[indistinct]
[Paul] What did it sound like with the bass doing a funny thing?
Keep that one. Mark it "fab."
- [John] Music. - [cheering fades]
[Paul] Making good music in a band is all about chemistry.
The way our four very different personalities combined in the Beatles
was something very special.
[crowd cheering]
[Paul] When we lost John, we knew that it was really over.
But in 1994, amazingly, an interesting opportunity arose.
We could make more music together.
[George] If we were to do something, the three of us,
as interesting as it may be,
to have John in it is the obvious thing.
I was talking to Yoko and she said, "Ah, I think I've got a tape of John."
[Paul] We were pretty excited. A new John song. Amazing.
[George] To hear John's voice… That's a thing that we should cherish.
And I'm sure he would've really enjoyed that opportunity to be with us again.
[Ringo] We could use John and try and make a record.
It was the closest we'll ever come to having him back in the room.
[horn honks]
[horns honking]
[Sean] I do remember living at the Dakota with Dad and Mom.
There's this impression
that my dad stopped doing music for a while to raise me,
which I think is partially true in terms of him not touring
and not fulfilling any major record label obligations.
But he was always playing music around the house.
He was always making demos.
And I do remember him recording into these tape cassette recorders.
Mom had these handful of songs that my dad hadn't finished,
and she gave them to the other Beatles.
[Paul] George and Ringo came down to my studio.
[birds twittering]
- Nice day. - [Ringo chuckles] Fabulous day.
[Paul] We listened to the track.
[piano playing]
There's John in his apartment in New York City,
banging away at his piano, doing a little demo.
"Is it something we shouldn't do?"
Every time I thought like that, I thought, "Wait a minute.
Let's say I had a chance to ask John,
'Hey, John, would you like us to finish this last song of yours?'"
[chattering]
[Paul] I'm telling you, I know the answer would have been, "Yeah."
He would have loved that.
[piano playing]
[John on tape] ♪ I know it's true ♪
[piano continues]
♪ It's all because of you ♪
[Ringo] It was very strange when we started
that there's only three of us after all those years and all that life.
John, do you wanna put the kettle on?
[people chattering, laughing]
[playing "Norwegian Wood" off-key]
- [George] No. - [Ringo, Paul laughing]
[Paul] We did "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love,"
and we got a little bit of time left to do "Now And Then."
[Ringo] When we started "Now And Then,"
it was very difficult because John was sort of hidden in a way.
[piano playing]
[Paul] In John's demo tape, the piano was a little hard to hear.
And in those days, of course, we didn't have the technology to do the separation.
[John] ♪ That I… ♪
You know, that's computer stuff.
I was telling you a year ago, Jeff was doing this thing on his computer.
But it opens up a whole other kettle of fish as to...
Can of worms?
But will it open another year of work?
It really brought to the fore, to the three of us, that John's gone.
[piano playing]
[Paul] Every time we wanted a little bit more of John's voice,
this piano came through and clouded the picture.
[John] ♪ It's all because of you ♪
[Paul] I think we kind of ran out of steam a bit, and time.
And it was like, "Well, I don't know. Maybe we'll leave this one."
[piano playing]
[snaps fingers]
[George] Ah, I don't know what he was doing.
- [all laugh] - [Ringo] He had no idea.
- Okay, see you next year. - See you next week.
[Paul] "Now And Then" just kind of languished in a cupboard.
[door closes]
And then in 2001, we lost George.
Which kind of took the wind out of our sails.
[birds twittering]
It took almost a quarter of a century for us to wait until the right moment
to tackle "Now And Then" again.
With the technology that Peter Jackson and his team
had worked out during the Get Back movie,
he'd been able to separate off certain instruments and voices.
[Peter] During the course of Get Back,
we were paying a lot of attention to the technical restoration.
That ultimately led us to develop a technology
which allows us to take any soundtrack and split all the different components
into separate tracks based on machine learning.
[Ringo] Peter Jackson has the MAL machine…
- Morning, Paul! - …which can just lift anything.
- How are you this morning? - Okay!
[Paul] We thought, "Well, we'd better send John's voice to them
off the original cassette."
[Sean] My dad would've loved that
because he was never shy to experiment with recording technology.
I think it's really beautiful.
[machine warbling, beeping]
[Paul] They said, "This is the sound of John's voice."
[imitating machine beeping]
A few seconds later or however long it took,
and there it was, John's voice.
Crystal clear.
[John] ♪ I know it's true ♪
♪ It's all because of you ♪
♪ And if I make it through ♪
♪ It's all because ♪
♪ Of you ♪
- [Peter] Do it again. - [Ringo] Since, uh, Peter took John off
and gave him his own track, it's like John's there, you know?
It's far-out.
[Paul] So in the mix, we could lift John's voice without lifting the piano,
which had always been one of the problems.
Now we could mix it and make a proper record of it.
- [demo playing through speakers] - I pulled it out, had a listen to it
and thought, "Oh, I could actually do the bass a bit better.
So, why don't I start there?"
[John] ♪ And now and then… ♪
[Ringo] Paul called me up and said he'd like to work on, uh, "Now And Then."
"What do you think?" "I think it's great."
So, he put the bass on.
He sent the files to me.
I put the drums on.
[Paul] It really brought it on, you know?
And so now we had a track that was really starting to cook.
[music ends]
I'd been vaguely thinking strings might be a good thing.
The Beatles did lots of string things.
You know, "Strawberry Fields," "Yesterday," "I am the Walrus."
We wanted to go to Capitol Studios
'cause that had been EMI, and it was sort of "Beatle-y."
Giles worked up an arrangement
like Giles's dad would have done in the old days.
[chattering]
[Paul] We had to put the music out on the stands for the musicians,
but we couldn't tell 'em it was a new Beatles song.
It was all a bit hush-hush.
We pretended it was just something of mine.
[music ends]
On the new record, there's a guitar solo.
[slide guitar playing]
We had kept George's guitar parts from '95.
And I thought, what I'd like to do is do a slide guitar solo in George's style.
It was really a tribute to George.
And then we started mixing it.
Wow.
This is it. Now it's a Beatle record.
[Ringo through speakers] One, two.
["Now And Then" playing]
[Sean] It was incredibly touching to hear them working together
after all the years that my dad had been gone.
[John] ♪ I know it's true ♪
[Sean] It's the last song that
my dad and Paul and George and Ringo will get to make together.
[John] ♪ And if I make it through ♪
♪ It's all because ♪
♪ Of you ♪
[Paul] All of those memories come flooding back.
My God. How lucky was I to have those men in my life
and to work with those men so intimately and to come up with such a body of music?
To still be working on Beatles music in 2023, wow.
We're actually messing around with state-of-the-art technology,
which is something the Beatles would've been very interested in.
"Now And Then," it's probably, like, the last Beatles song.
And we've all played on it, so it is a genuine Beatle recording.
[chattering]
[crowd cheering, fades]
[Paul] I'll tell you what.
Why don't you just give me a little bit of his original demo
to sort of hear how he's playing the piano?
- [guitar playing] - [George] That part could be played on,
like, another thing.
- [Paul] Ringo can play it on his drum. - [Ringo] I can.
[Paul] Yeah, tuned tom-toms. Yeah.
- [imitating drum] - [George] We'll come in after this.
[Paul] Yeah. And I'm thinking verse three could be,
like, the intro again, you know?
[Ringo] Start again. [chuckles]
[George yawns] When are we ever gonna get to sleep?
- [Paul] Now, there's a good question. - [George] No rest for the wicked.
- [Paul] DIN, son. Do it now. - [Ringo] Do it now.
[George] Go on then. Back it up a bit.
[drums playing]
[Beatle whistling]
[Paul] Can I just hear John a sec?