Once upon a long ago, the world went into a kind of paralysis when the Beatles released a new single, such was the trance-like sway they held over Western culture.

The hourglass encasing the Sixties seemed to fracture for an instant, holding all those grains of sands in a timeless swirl as fans of the Fabs rejoiced in the latest song to trundle off the Lennon-McCartney production line.

It is now 60 years since Beatlemania engulfed first Britain and then, via America, the world. No one then imagined that here in 2023 the music of the Beatles would still command so much rapt public and media attention.

Today’s release of Now And Then, an exhumed John Lennon demo which has been sonically repurposed through the latest advances in technical wizardry, underpins the insatiable fascination – some might say obsession - we still have for the Beatles.

But amid all this allure lies an ineluctable truth.

Read more: A LIFE IN SONGS: The tracks that made The Beatles

Now And Then cannot possibly scale the same heights as those classic Beatles singles such as She Loves You, Day Tripper, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Help, Penny Lane, Lady Madonna, Something and Hey Jude. Put simply, we live in different times – and the Beatles were a product of their times. That was then...this is now.

While some fans are delighted to hear even the most embryonic of Beatle releases, others would simply prefer that they let it be. And that perhaps partly explains the sharp online divisions the song has created among the group’s multi-generational fanbase, particularly over its origins and tangled recording history.

Lennon workshopped Now And Then in the late Seventies during his five-year hiatus from the music industry by recording his slightly tinny vocal onto a cassette recorder perched on top of a piano at his New York home. Rough and rudimentary, the song was lyrically unfinished and seemingly unloved by its author. 

Proof lies in the fact Lennon never took the song into the studio where he was currently shaping his comeback album Double Fantasy and his tragic murder in December 1980 ensured the track – and the cassette it was recorded on - remained permanently locked away inside the Dakota apartment he shared with wife Yoko Ono and young son Sean as well as slamming down a sarcophagus lid on any future Beatles’ reunion.

And that likely would have been the song’s fate, along with a clutch of other undeveloped demos Lennon had been working on prior to his death at the age of 40.

Fast forward, however, to the early Nineties, which marked a thaw in familial relations between Ono and, especially, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Following Lennon’s induction into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of fame by McCartney, she offered up the tantalising prospect of using the songs for the Beatles’ Anthology project, a massive retrospective of their storied career.

And so it was that the Threetles – as the media dubbed the surviving trio – regrouped at McCartney’s home studio alongside uber fan-turned-producer Jeff Lynne to try and salvage the three songs on Ono’s tapes.

Two of them – Free As A Bird and Real Love – passed the quality kitemark. Just.

But Now And Then languished on the board, a low-fi car crash. Parts of the song’s ghostly vocal were largely muffled and the accompanying mains cycle hum simply couldn’t be removed, leaving it sonically doomed.

Read more: The Beatles 'Love Me Do' at 60 and their Scottish legacy

And there was another impediment; Harrison dismissed it to McCartney’s face as “f****** rubbish”, consequently ripping apart the Beatles’ musketeer mantra that, if one of them had no faith in a song, it was instantly jettisoned for something better.

Inevitably, Lennon’s original demo found itself swirling in a Beatles afterlife on the internet, attracting curious interest from fans, bootleggers and digital musicians who simply took the vocal and overlaid it onto their own versions of the song.

McCartney, meanwhile, simply refused to let Now And Then wither on the vine, digital or otherwise. Doggedly convinced of its merits, he repeatedly told friends that one day he would “sneak into the studio” and finish the song. His reasons to place a tick against this bucket-list type ambition were intrinsically personal. Beatle folklore has it that the cassette Lennon recorded the song on was marked “for Paul’’. Fanciful as this notion sounds, in McCartney’s mind it nevertheless imbued the song with untold depths of emotion.

Hope then arrived from the most unlikeliest of sources. In 2021, Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning New Zealand filmmaker, oversaw a restored nine-hour version of Let It Be, the 1969 movie which captured the band’s self-immolation. Using the latest audio software, team Jackson brought the outmoded dialogue and songs magically into the 21st century.

When he informed McCartney he could use the same techniques to isolate and extract Lennon’s vocal in other songs, hinting at the use of artificial intelligence, Paul’s interest in reviving Now And Then was again piqued. Over the past 18 months, the song has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis. Ringo Starr, after some mild hesitation, agreed to lay down new drum parts and they had Harrison’s guitar parts from the original sessions in the Nineties recorded before his death from cancer in 2001. Giles Martin, son of the band’s legendary producer George, was drafted in to oversee the addition of a wistful and quintessentially Beatles string arrangement.

It says much for McCartney’s powers of persuasion that he was able to convince Harrison’s widow Olivia and their musician son Dhani to set aside George’s initial cheerless judgment and sign off on the song. In mitigation, Dhani is now insisting his father’s antipathy centred on the track’s technical limitations rather than the quality of the song itself.

The result is a track that has risen phoenix-like from the ashes to become the Beatles’ final love letter to the world – and to each other. It should come as no surprise, then, that the finished product is an unexpected triumph. What could have been a Frankenstein-type AI pastiche is instead a fully-realised Beatles record, one where its dreamy psychedelic flow lets Lennon’s hauntingly beautiful vocal linger in your mind. The recording’s wistful undercurrent allows fans to be grateful for what they gave us as much as grieving for what was lost.

And it remains eerily comforting to hear all four Beatles coming together one last time on a new song the same way they used to do now and then back in those carefree days when we was Fab.

Ken McNab is an author and journalist, whose new Beatles book Shake It Up Baby is out now. Click here to buy and find out more.