In the weeks after the Grenfell disaster, the radio was full of ballads, big mournful songs which were sequenced in attempts to give distance and pay respects (DJs don’t really cope well with events as disrupting as this).
As ever, the tunes that resonated most were by The Beatles, as they have the ability to talk to the human condition while offering a link to the past.
We love The Beatles.
Some critics have been unkind about Sir Paul McCartney’s decision to use AI to complete an unfinished song by John Lennon, Now and Then, claiming it’s inconsequential. Well, it’s not, and actually contains one of his loveliest melodies, reinforcing the fact that Lennon was often a greater sentimentalist than McCartney. If you’re unsure, simply click on YouTube, where you can hear a not-unimpressive reboot of the re-recording, produced by ELO’s Jeff Lynne for inclusion on the Beatles’ Anthology albums back in the mid-Nineties.
McCartney talks about this being the very final Beatles record (it’s going to be released at the end of the year) but I hope not, as there is one more unfinished Lennon song in the vaults that deserves to be released. When, on New Year’s Day, 1994, McCartney phoned Yoko Ono, asking if she had any of John’s old demos that they could perhaps use as a base for a new song to publicise the series, she sent over a cassette tape containing four songs: Free As A Bird, Feel Love, Now And Then and Grow Old With Me.
“The Beatles had become a very important power to many people,” she said. “I felt that for me to stand in the way of that reunion would be wrong. So I decided to go with the flow. And after all, the Beatles were John’s group.”
Having re-recorded both Free As A Bird and Real Love as singles, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr started playing around with Now And Then — which had been recorded by Lennon in his apartment the Dakota Building in 1979, the year before he was fatally shot — and which actually showed more promise than either of the released “Threetles” singles. In March 1995, the three of them started working on Now And Then by recording a backing track, however after only a day’s work, the song was abandoned, and scrapped. Lynne said the session — which took place, like all the Anthology sessions, at McCartney’s studio at The Mill, in East Sussex — consisted only of “one day — one afternoon, really — messing with it. The song had a chorus but almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go we really didn’t finish.”
Although there was a mains hum on the original recording, the dreamy quality of the original record, plus the passages between the vocals, actually afforded more of an experimental feeling, one that would have suited some playful extemporising. Harrison, for one, felt the song didn’t warrant any more attention. In 1997, McCartney would say, “George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
The fourth song on Yoko’s tapes was Grow Old With Me. A version had actually already been released, on the 1984 posthumous John Lennon album Milk And Honey.
“For John, Grow Old With Me was one that would be a standard,” said Yoko, “the kind they would play in church every time a couple gets married. It was horns and symphony time.” Like Hey Jude, Lennon imagined it as the sort of song people would sing around campfires.
Having had it rejected by the remaining Beatles, in 1996 Yoko would ask Beatles producer George Martin to overhaul it for inclusion on a Lennon-only compilation. Martin liked the song more than any other Lennon demo he had heard since his death and used his considerable skills to give it the gravitas it needed. Its arrangement is unassuming: the strings swell and the flutes trill in all the right places, leaving Lennon’s plaintive, occasionally maudlin voice to carry the song to its inevitable conclusion.
The Beatles should have persevered with Grow Old With Me. As a balming last hurrah it would have been a more than fitting denouement. Perhaps it still will.
