Number 25 - Now and Then

Beatles Involved:

John (posthumous), Paul, George and Ringo

Listenability:

No recording involving more 

than one Beatle is available.

For a few months in early 1994 and early 1995 Paul, George and Ringo utilised John's home demos of 'Free As A Bird' and 'Real Love' to create two new Beatles songs. At some point during this period they also worked briefly on a third John home demo which is variously titled 'Now and Then' or 'I Don't Want To Lose You' or 'Miss You'. The three Beatles abandoned their attempts to embellish the song shortly after they started. John's home demo reveals that the song itself isn't particularly good. It has some nice moments, but overall it is slow and lugubrious. A slightly sped up edited version of the song can be heard below.

What They Said About It:

Paul:

It didn't have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking. It had a beautiful verse and it had John singing on it. But George didn't want to do it. 

Taken from: Daily Express. Sun, April 29. 2007

And there was another one, that we started working on but George went off it (grumbles imitating George’s voice) ‘...rubbish this is’. It’s like, ‘No George, this is John’. He said, ‘It’s still... rubbish!’ ‘Oh, OK then’. So that one’s still lingering around too. I’m gonna nick in with Jeff and do it, finish it, one of these days.                       Taken from Mr Blue Sky - The story of Jeff Lynne and ELO (BBC documentary) 

Ringo:

And we also did another song that we didn't finish because that's not how The Beatles worked. We didn't just do John songs, or Paul songs. We needed a couple of George tracks, a couple of Paul's, and my track, to make it more real.               Taken from Q. December 1995 p.128

Yoko Ono:

I sent those songs to them when the situation was quite different. Now that George is gone, I don't know if the same would apply. I will consider the possibility, that is, when I get the call.Yoko in 2005 responding to media reports that the song could be finished as a Beatles song. Taken from: The Washington Post Sunday, August 21, 2005 

Jeff Lynne:

Question: They didn't work on any other songs than the three you mentioned? Didn't work on "Grow Old With Me," as a lot of press reports said? 

No. It was only the three.

Question: How many sessions were there for the third song? 

It was one day - one afternoon, really - messing with it, because a lot of the words weren't on there. We did the backing track, a sort of backing track, a rough go of one that we didn't really finish. We got an arrangement kind of going but we didn't finish it and went straight on to "Real Love" because of the time factor. 

Question: Is there a possibility you will all get together to finish that song?  

There was never anything said about that. 

Taken from Beatlefan #97. Parts of this same interview were also published in LA TIMES Nov 18, 1995

Question: How about that? So will we ever hear "Grow Old With Me" or "All For Love" or "Help Me To Help Myself"? 

I don't think we'll ever hear the extra one. There was one other song that we listened to and I think we may have played on it once - or they may have played once through it - but it was never done or finished or anything like that.
Taken from: The Examiner, February 15, 2013.

Question: I understand there was a third track you worked on with Paul, George and Ringo called 'Now and Then.'

We started on it. It was good, but it never got finished. It never got developed enough as a song for us to ever go back and seriously finish it, but it could be finished one day. Taken from: Gold Mine Interview, 'Jeff Lynne revists his roots with ELO and classic covers projects. 24 June 2013 

Geoff Emerick:

We did start work on it, but it was obviously unfinished from a writing point of view, so we thought, we'd work on 'Real Love' which had a complete set of words. It'll need to be completed as a song before everybody decides what to do with it, and it's not hard to imagine who would finish writing it. 

Taken from: SOUND ON SOUND Magazine (December 1995). Geoff Emerick is the recording studio audio engineer who worked with The Beatles on a number of their later albums and their 1990's studio reunions.

Other Bits and Pieces:

• A number of 'fake reunion' versions of the song 'Now and Then' exist on the internet featuring overdubs to remake the song in the style of The Beatles. Two of these are featured below:

Number 24 - Beautiful Night

Beatles Involved:

Paul and Ringo

Listenability: 3 out of 5.

A Paul piano ballad from the 1980's that he dug out and rerecorded in 1996 for his Flaming Pie album. Ringo plays drums on the track and other highlights include George Martin's orchestration at the end with Ringo adding some lead vocals for the extended coda. The song's chords are nice and the melody is passable. The lyrics go nowhere and detract from the overall quality of the song.

What They Said About It:

Paul:

For years I’ve been saying to Ringo, ‘cause we’d never really done much work outside The Beatles, oh it’d be great to do something you know. Because we got our friendship going again with The Anthology. And I’d had a song called Beautiful Night which I wrote quite a long time ago. And I’d always liked it, and people who’d heard it had liked it. But I never felt it was the right version of it. I just felt I just hadn’t quite pulled it off.

And so I got Beautiful Night out, sorted it out, got the chords and stuff and all that. It goes really nice, I sat down, I sat on the piano and he just started and it was just like old days and I realised we haven’t done this for so long, you know. And it was so comfortable, because you know, it is that thing, if you’ve know each other that long and done so much work with them, unless you both completely lose the plot it’s sort of still there you know. So it very much was and it was lovely to work with him again. And as we’re coming away from the...into the control room, Ringo sort of [said] ‘Come on, on your way.’ He was doing like a doorman so we left that on the end of the track.

Ringo:

He invited me to play on the track ‘Beautiful Night’ so I said ‘Sure’. ‘Cause I think it’s a beautiful track and we found the time when I was in England and we spent the day with him and Linda and record, Barbara and I. I still feel really comfortable playing with his bass playing. Well playing with him really, but you know, the drums and bass. It’s, I think you know we have all that history and it comes into play when we play together. You just can’t dismiss that.

Other Bits and Pieces 

• The following video shows Paul recording the track and includes some footage of Ringo and George Martin.

• Vocal group 'Blake' recorded a cover version of Beautiful Night and released the following video clip in early  2013.