The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’ and lost futures

The Beatles, it must never, ever be forgotten, were weird. Gloriously, restlessly weird. It took them less than four years to go from the ecstatic but conventional pop of Please Please Me to the backwards solos, sampling and single-chord Indian-inflected drones of Revolver. Listen back to “Strawberry Fields Forever” or any number of tracks off Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — a half-realised concept around a fictional nostalgia act, 20 years past their prime, putting on a final concert — and get a load of how wonderfully strange it still sounds. The Beatles were an unrepeatable phenomenon for so many reasons, but acutely, it’s unimaginable that the biggest group in the world would just get weirder and weirder and seemingly not lose a single fan.

“Now and Then”, the “final Beatles song”, is out. It’s the third time the remaining members of the group have excavated home-recorded scraps by John Lennon from the late ’70s and woven them with new material to build full songs. While Lennon was a spectral presence on 1994’s “Free as a Bird” and 1995’s “Real Love” owing to the technical difficulties of plucking his voice from the fuzz of those recordings, newly developed AI software has allowed his voice to be drawn out of its ghostly surrounds to be heard pristine and clear.

The party line from Lennon and George Harrison’s estates is they would have been thrilled at the use of cutting-edge technology to facilitate a posthumous reunion, and certainly it is incredible how clearly Lennon comes through. On the short accompanying documentary available on YouTube — after a short, unskippable advert for Trolls Band Together, in which CGI renderings of a kids’ toy from the ’90s perform pop hits from the last 30 years — we hear, acapella, Lennon’s truly extraordinary voice, its frailty and power, and the effect is shattering. And yet it’s very hard to imagine the Beatles of their prime being particularly excited about what this technology was used to achieve — a perfectly lovely song, rendered flat and frictionless by its production, which sounds modern only in its placelessness. The string section, which mimics the form and rhythms that were so bright and edgy on “Glass Onion” or “Eleanor Rigby“, is so seamlessly incorporated, so tasteful, on “Now and Then” it barely registers until several listens in. “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” both achieved more grandeur and a more keen sense of a beautiful, retreating memory, partly because neither could fully shift the strange faded quality of the original tapes. The songs sounded weird, so they sounded like The Beatles.

The late Mark Fisher’s writing on music, culture and “lost futures” — which drew heavily on Derrida’s notion of “hauntology”, the idea nothing is simply present, but forever inflected with the past and the future — was custom-designed for this moment. Fisher wrote of the growing of cultural expression dedicated to a vague, eternal past; Adele, say, is not marketed as a retro artist in the same way Michael Buble is, yet you could beam her music back 20 years without disorienting the listener the way Joy Division would have affected someone in 1959, or how Wu-Tang Clan’s first album would have sounded to a hip hop fan of roughly 10 years earlier.

He notes that technology at one point fueled innovation, giving a sense of the future — sampling, various branches of dance music, electronic music — and is now, though accelerating faster than at any time in history, largely dedicated to refurbishing the old; one only has to think of the cutting-edge technology dedicated to making the largely very similar superhero franchises that have dominated 21st-century mainstream cinema.

The nostalgic mode, Fisher argues, has become dominant as the social structure that made the original work possible, and the future it promised has slowly vanished — people retreat to the old and established to re-access the feeling of possibility that it contained for them, possibility that has since been slowly extinguished. For one example, the generation of musicians of which The Beatles were at the forefront, were products of a post-war, pre-Thatcher Britain, which briefly allowed working-class people access to the highest levels of cultural production. A lack of affordable housing, the inability of all but a tiny section of society to dick about in art school for a while, the more general neoliberal sense that cultural production has to “justify” what it costs, the splintering of consumption into atomised and individualised algorithm-driven platforms, and the iron grip of copyright makes that kind of thing much, much harder.

So I detect a slight desperation to find transcendence in this moment and this song in some of the coverage; “It’s the final masterpiece that The Beatles — and their fans — deserve,” argues Rolling Stone, itself a relic of an idea of popular culture that hasn’t existed for a very long time.

“Now and Then” landed on streaming services twinned with a remastered version of their first single, “Love Me Do”. With the audibly nervous vocal of a 20-year-old McCartney and its inescapable boyish swing, the song represents the intake of breath before one of the most joyous melodies of all time commences. It’s full hauntology. The poignancy and meaning that “Now and Then” needs is drawn from its place suspended in a future that the performers — for good and for ill — couldn’t conceivably have imagined.

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