So that’s it. 4 more minutes and 8 more seconds of Beatles music. The full line up reunited one final time through the alchemy of technology and a battered, once-unrecoverable tape demo of a man 43 years in the grave. By what measure do you look at a song like this? Penned by one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century but completed in his absence by a man driven by the preservation of his own legacy as well as that of his band.
Maybe all you can do is listen to it.
The song itself has existed as a widely reinterpreted bootleg on the internet for almost as long as there’s been an internet. The surviving Beatles tried to work with it during the making of the Anthology series in the mid 90s, but the technology really wasn’t up it. It wasn’t even up to the two official releases really: both Free as Bird and Real Love had to be drowned in a very un-Beatley syrup of Jeff Lynne’s designing.
The fan re-imaginings were hampered by the same problems and found the same answers: overload the vocals with harmonies and instrumentation.
But technology has breathed life into the song, and McCartney has the swansong he’s always wanted: to sing with his friend for one last time.
And who could deny him the right? There’s a kind of snarky, shallow “meh The Beatles were overrated” internet school of thought (surprise!) that has surfaced a lot in the last decade or so. In some ways, I think in popular imagination they’ve become overshadowed by Queen – whose mythic presence in the pop landscape just seems that bit closer to today’s sound. The Beatles had ‘Live Aid’ style media moments, but most of their concerts were underpowered, and occurred during a time in their career when they still had to hit their full creative peak.
Like Elvis, the grainy black and white footage and lacklustre sound recording mean that the shock of the new seems beyond understanding to anyone born this side of 1970.
But partly that’s the point: the Beatles never had anything. All they did they invented from scratch. In 7 years they produced 12 albums and over 200 songs. And what they did revolutionised everything. Music. Art. Fashion. Language. Social attitudes. They reinvented pop not just once, but with almost every release.
And when the band broke up? They were all still under thirty. There was simply no blueprint. Everything they did became the blueprint: the high watermark of popular song. Saying you don’t rate the Beatles is as pointless as saying you don’t rate Shakespeare: the influence is everywhere regardless.
The same band busking their way through the monolithically simple Love Me Do in 1962 released the most widely distributed piece of avant-garde art in history in 1968 – Revolution #9. The same band shaking their moptops to Can’t Buy Me Love in 1963 are now – 60 years later – releasing a song that represents the very apogee of recording technology. They were at the cutting edge right till the end.
But all of that is just noise: history decides what is relevant in the end. It doesn’t matter whether you personally do or don’t like the Beatles: this exists now and for a 10th dan Beatles nerd like me has to be reckoned with. So…
It’s not bad.
After the Beatles, all of the members carried on making music that varied in content and quality and this has the hallmarks of a lot of Lennon’s later solo work. Nothing is objectively bad about it, but it lacks the qualities that made the Beatles as a unit – and Lennon in particular – unique. Everything fits together nicely in equal measures, and the the lyrics are serviceable enough, but Lennon’s raw artistic urgency had long left the building by this point.
Whereas once he would brusquely chop beats and bars out of his songs, or experiment with the building blocks of idiosyncratic chord choices, this is just a… nice song. There are none of the surprising kinds of shift in rhythm or harmony that made so much of Lennon’s work distinct from his imitators. In the Beatles, Lennon was rarely bland but by the the times of his death his output was not much spikier than the typical Wings record in truth. So the song as a song is really only notable because of who wrote it – like a Picasso sketch on a napkin.
But… Ringo’s drums sound forty five thousand times better than they did on the previous Beatles tracks of the 90s (Jeff Lynne seemingly determined to cut the Beatles down to Travelling Wilburys size). Macca’s bass is fat and full of the fluidity that informed his playing during the peak psychedelic era. As a rhythm section they’ve still got it. And Lennon’s voice is clear and strong – rightly holding centre stage, McCartney paying respect by keeping his vocals firmly in the background.
Giles Martin’s choppy string arrangement (so unlike the syrupy goo that Phil Spector drizzled all over The Long and Winding Road) has the authentic, inescapably nostalgic feel of an era. Lennon’s voice is at the more winsome end of his range, displaying the vulnerable side to the man who so often hid behind an aggressive snarl.
It is human and it is tender and has verses of oddly melancholic feel, and a chorus just the right side of uplifting.
So despite the nostalgia, and the question marks about whether this project has been worth its while, it is now part of Beatles canon.
In the end, nobody could have done it better. And maybe that’s enough.
Let it be.