The Beatles - A Day in my Life.
02 Nov 2023I know it’s true,
It’s all because of you … —The Beatles, ‘Now and Then’
Today marks the day the 🎶 ‘last Beatles song’ is to be released.
The Beatles - Now and Then single cover
Now and Then has been preceded by a short documentary and, following the first playing at 2pm UK time, will be followed by a Peter Jackson directed music video.
I’m a huge fan of The Beatles, both as a group and in regard to their solo work, so it’s a moment I’m looking forward to but it has been interesting to read opposing viewpoints on the release of the track.
Like Free as a Bird and Real Love, released as part of The Beatles Anthology set back in 1995, these tracks were not worked on by The Beatles as a collective so are they ‘real’ Beatles songs?
As a society we seem to spend a lot of time looking back nostalgically, possibly because it’s so worrying looking towards a future full of so much uncertainty. The Beatles represent a time where things seemed like they could be better, a peak of success in a 🌍 country that has 📉 declined on both a global and a national level, a 🌻 hippy ideal of a world that never arrived.
Nostalgia can be a damaging mindset in many ways, stopping people from facing up to their issues and taking on future problems. But 🎶 music and the 🎭 arts sit outside this type of nostalgia for me. I remember staying up listening to the 📻 radio for the first notes of Free as a Bird when its embargo was lifted. This moment—tired, half asleep, curious—set my path as a future Beatles fan (I’d not given them much thought prior to the marketing push of the Anthology series) and their music has given me so much happiness over the years and led to my own music creation and love of music.
I don’t have high hopes of Now and Then being a ‘classic’ Beatles track, but if it provides the spark to someone that I received many years ago, it will have done what it was created to do.