A week ago I came across this on a Beatles blog I read occasionally — someone has done a video for the John Lennon demo of “Now and Then,” the song the surviving Beatles worked on in the 1990s and left unfinished.
The version of the song in the video is intriguing. It’s a decent mash-up of Beatle-like sounds and backing vocals, layered over a drastically cut version of Lennon’s demo.
It’s probably nothing like what the Beatles would have created had they finished the song. Their reasons for not finishing work on Lennon’s demo are two-fold: the demo has a persistent hum (and it can be heard prominently at the beginning of the fan video), and George Harrison wasn’t keen to work on the song because it wasn’t close to being finished by John. (There’s a point in the demo where John makes nonsense sounds to fill the lyric.)
There are persistent rumors that Paul McCartney may release the song in some fashion in the near future. One rumor is that when the remastered Beatles catalog is released we’ll see the “final” version of “Now and Then.”
In the meantime, there is this fascinating video of the song. I’ve stripped the audio track out of the video for my own personal amusement. Where did I place the file? Why, in my Beatles directory, of course. 😉