The Pop Corporation

The big news is that we’re going to have some new music from The Beatles this year. Will it be great and better than anything they’ve done before? Probably not, but this is still exciting stuff for Fab Four Dorks around the world. We’re excited.

Paul McCartney says he’s used artificial intelligence to help create “the final Beatles record”. Now, before you start getting your underpants in a bunch, he’s not asked AI to finish the melody or anything like that. He’s Paul McFuckingCartney – he doesn’t need help finishing songs, y’clown! Talking to Radio 4, he said that the tech was used to ‘extricate’ John Lennon’s voice from an old demo tape.

“We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” he explained, and it is rumoured that it’ll be based on the ‘Now And Then’ demo, a sombre number from ’78.

Macca received the demo from Yoko Ono on a cassette that was labelled ‘For Paul’ before Lennon’s murder in 1980.

Previously, these demos had been looked at by Jeff Lynne, which of course, birthed ‘Real Love’ and ‘Free As A Bird’ which were released back in the ’90s.

Jeff Lynne said of it: “It was one day – one afternoon, really – messing with it. The song had a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really didn’t finish.”

The track wasn’t finished because George Harrison thought it was “fucking rubbish”, and without a clean sweep of affirmative votes, it was nixed.

In the demo, there was a persistent buzzing sound, which may have been solved thanks to improvements in technology and noise reduction. Of course, a lot of the new music technology was employed during Peter Jackson’s ‘Get Back’ film, which helped to clean up a lot of noisy old recordings.

“He [Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” said Paul, continuing: “We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar’. So when we came to to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI.”

“Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do. So it gives you some sort of leeway.”

Another song on the cassette was ‘Grow Old With Me’, which was included on ‘Milk and Honey’. This song feels more unlikely as it’s a standard love song, whereas ‘Now And Then’ has been viewed by Beatle fans as a love letter to McCartney from his old pal Johnny.

This is almost certainly going to be the last music released under The Beatles’ name while Paul and Ringo are still with us and, honestly, we’re choosing optimism on this one. We think it will be a sweet (bittersweet maybe) bookend to the career of the greatest band who ever existed. There’ll be more from the vaults in their passing, so until then, we’ll have to see what Paul and Ringo have in store.