In sound recording terms,it’s a world unrecognisable from the thrilling urgency ofI Saw Her Standing There.
Then,it was all about catching lightning in a bottle as four hungry kids plugged in,eyeballed each other across the room and smashed it out live,like they did on the Reeperbahn.
Now? George Harrison’s strummed acoustic guitar hails from 1995,Paul McCartney’s plangent piano chords and Ringo Starr’s snapping rimshots from 2022. And it’s John Lennon – spirited in from a ropey late-1970s demo via Peter Jackson’s 21st Century digital clean-up algorithm – who owns it. His voice. His song. His words and,crucially,his mood.
On those terms,Now And Then is cut from the same cloth as the other two Beatles songs salvaged from the famous cassette bequeathed by Lennon’s widow,Yoko Ono,in 1994.
LikeFree As A Bird andReal Love,it was conceived by a “househusband” singing to himself at an upright piano,introspection and melancholy hardwired to its unmistakably modulating chords.
In terms of the band’s original arc,the effect is to place all three songs in the vaguely delirious mid-1960s zone whereRain bled intoA Day In The Life,the other three players dutifully following their increasingly self-absorbed leader into a solitary realm of psychedelic detachment.