The Pop Corporation

The Beatles have casually dropped a tweet that’s got everyone’s knickers in a twist. It’s a link to their website where there’s a graphic of a cassette. There’s already some clues to be worked out too, for the eagled eyed.

First, let’s look at the cassette.

You can zoom in a bit harder when you’re on the site, and on the cassette, you can see some words. Just legal gubbins, right? Maybe, but there’s something of note.

It says: “Copyright in this sound recording is owned by Yoko Ono Lennon”.

Now, rumour has it that The Beatles were finishing a composition of Lennon’s, and all signs point to ‘Now and Then’, recorded as a home demo in 1979. It was played around with by McCartney, Harrison and Starr during the ’95 Anthology sessions, but ultimately never finished.

However, Peter Jackson came up with some technology to better extract voices during the Get Back sessions, and this has been employed to finish this song, we think. ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’ were on the same cassette, with another song, ‘Grow Old With Me’.

The tape was labelled ‘For Paul’.

‘Grow Old with Me’ saw the light of day on the posthumous ‘Milk & Honey’ LP, so all that remains is ‘Now and Then’. Harrison said the song was “fucking rubbish”, but George is no longer with us, and Paul and Ringo might well be giving us one last Beatle song – as they’ve vowed it’s the last release from the group.

We’re pretty certain it’s ‘Now and Then’, and bootlegs exist of the track, so if you want to have a hunt around on YouTube, feel free. We’re avoiding spoilers on here for the time being.

This campaign is a teaser for a mailout, and the use of a cassette is a nod to the one given to McCartney by Yoko, you have to assume.

You can see the tape on TheBeatles.com and sign-up (if the site recovers from the deluge of traffic that’s caused it to seize up currently). We think it’ll be a countdown or you’ll get an email on release, but honestly, everyone will be talking about it and you’re unlikely to miss out.

It seems the track will be released within the next 24 hours, so this is all incredibly exciting.