“Worked with old Johnny”

Paul McCartney: Working on the last Beatles song was magical

Ex-Beatles member Paul McCartney has described working on what is probably the last Beatles song “Now And Then” as magical. For him it was as if the murdered John Lennon had been standing in the next room.

London. Musician Paul McCartney (81) described working on the Beatles’ final song as magical. The song “Now And Then,” which also features the voice of the murdered John Lennon, was completed later. The material had been lying around for a long time and he kept thinking: “We should finish this,” McCartney said in an interview with the BBC, according to the British news agency PA.

More than half a century after the band split up, the new single was released on Thursday, with all four members contributing. Lennon originally wrote the song in the 1970s and recorded it in his apartment in New York.

After Lennon’s death, his widow Yoko Ono gave McCartney a cassette containing several demo recordings. He finished two of the songs with the other band members in 1995. But “Now And Then” remained unfinished for technical reasons because Lennon’s voice could not be extracted from the old cassette. Thanks to technological advances, McCartney and Ringo Starr were able to release the song decades later.

“It was kind of magical doing that.”

“It was kind of magical doing that,” McCartney said, according to PA. “When we were in the studio, we had John’s voice in our ears. So you could imagine him just being in the next room, in a vocal booth or something.” They would have worked with him again. “It was really nice, you know, because of course we hadn’t experienced that for a long time and then all of a sudden we were standing there working with the old Johnny,” McCartney said.