<\/p>\n
\n\tPaul McCartney<\/a> is more active than most folks a quarter of his age. The 81-year-old two-time Rock Hall inducted singer and songwriter dropped a \u201cnew\u201d Beatles<\/a> song last Thursday, its official music video on Friday, and completed a stadium tour of Australia on Saturday, produced by Frontier Touring<\/a>. Add-in a 12-minute Beatles mini-film and media commitments, and McCartney has seemingly managed to be everywhere, all at once. <\/p>\n \n\tSpeaking with BBC Radio 1, McCartney revealed that \u201cNow And Then\u201d is more than an ambitious passion project. The single, which took more than 40 years to complete, had a touch of magic<\/em> about it. <\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhen we were in the studio we had John\u2019s voice in our ears so you could imagine he was just in the next room in a vocal booth or something and we were just working with him again so it was joyful,\u201d he says, \u201cit was really lovely you know, because we hadn\u2019t experienced that for a long time obviously and then suddenly here we were working with ol\u2019 Johnny.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe track was originally a demo, written and sung by John Lennon into a tape recorder at New York\u2019s Dakota Building back in the 1970s. McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr attempted to resurrect the recording in the 1990s, but the audio quality was beyond help. That was, until Get Back<\/a><\/em> director Peter Jackson and his team at WingNut Films developed the MAL audio technology, powered by artificial intelligence, which could separate the stems. <\/p>\n \n\tCompleted with a string arrangement, written by Giles Martin, Paul and Ben Foster, and featuring contributions from all four Beatles, it\u2019s pitched as the \u201clast\u201d Beatles record.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIt was kind of magical doing it,\u201d McCartney adds.<\/p>\n \n\tThe single has blasted out of the gates in the United Kingdom. According to the Official Charts Company<\/a>, \u201cNow And Then\u201d leads the race for the chart crown, by outselling the rest of the top 5 combined. <\/p>\n \n\t\u201cNow And Then\u201d was completed with the assistance of AI, a story thread that arguably sidetracked the message around the announcement. Technology always intrigued the Beatles, McCartney notes. <\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe first time we heard a tape go backwards by mistake we went \u2018Oh what\u2019s that?\u2019 and we wanted to put that on our record, whereas other people would just go \u2018Oh come on get the tape on the right way and let\u2019s get on with it\u2019,\u201d he explains. \u201cBut we always grabbed little things like that so Peter Jackson, he\u2019s organized it so it\u2019s magic. It\u2019s very special for me to be singing with John again.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMcCartney also recounted his latest, hits-laden performance at Glastonbury Festival 2023, in June of this year. \u201cWell you know Glastonbury is special,\u201d he enthuses. \u201cWe\u2019d done an American tour to get up to speed with the band, we were excited to do Glastonbury just \u2019cause it\u2019s Glastonbury and then you get that many people singing something like \u2018Hey Jude\u2019 and you know, in this world today when the news is so often bad, it\u2019s just so great to see all these humans with such a loving vibe that you get at Glastonbury. No, it was great to do and I\u2019m glad we pulled it off.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tStream the interview here<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n