A few days ago, ‘The Beatles’, which means Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, released Now and Then, hailed as the new ’latest’ single by the band that no longer exists since 1970. What it is, is an assembly of vocals from a 1977 demo tape by John Lennon, 1995 recordings by George Harrison, and additional parts played more recently by Paul McCartney (who contributed bass guitar and a guitar solo, if I understand correctly the explanatory video) and Ringo Starr (on drums), plus orchestration, timid background vocals, and various other effects.

The result, if we set aside the magic brought by technology developed by Peter Jackson - a New Zealander who has dedicated his last few decades almost exclusively to reviving the splendors of 20th-century Britain -, is simply the sum of its parts, or perhaps even less than that: Lennon’s voice is increasingly distant, thinned by the necessary treatment to render usable a tape that was a simple cassette demo, suffocated by Giles Martin’s strings (can we have a Now and Then Naked?), and ‘supported’ by McCartney’s eighty-year-old voice. Perhaps suggestive from the conceptual point of view of ’now vs. then,’ but redundant and inappropriate to listen to.

Free as a Bird and Real Love, despite Jeff Lynne’s enthusiastic production, sounded much more Beatle-esque than this new track. I would be more interested in listening to applying these new technologies to updated versions of those two songs - which at least George Harrison approved for release - than to this even more nostalgic operation.