Sir Paul McCartney will unveil “the final Beatles record” using artificial intelligence to add John Lennon’s voice from more than 40 years ago.
Sir Paul, 81 on Sunday, said he used technology to “extricate” his old bandmate’s vocals to finally complete the song. Lennon, who was murdered in 1980, had recorded lo-fi tracks on just a boombox while sitting at a piano in his New York apartment.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Sir Paul said John’s widow Yoko Ono sent him a demo cassette thought to be a 1978 Lennon composition called Now And Then.
The demo had been considered a possible Beatles “reunion song” in 1995 after he received the tape the year before, labelled “For Paul”.
He said: “We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year.” Cleaned up by producer Jeff Lynne, two songs on the cassette Free As A Bird and Real Love were completed and released in 1995 and the year after, marking the Beatles’ first “new” material in 25 years.
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Sir Paul, George Harrison and Sir Ringo Starr also attempted to record Now And Then but the session was abandoned because of the lack of Lennon’s voice to fill out the song.
Sir Paul later said Harrison refused to work on it, saying the sound quality of Lennon’s vocal was “rubbish”.
Sir Paul said: “It didn’t have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it. [But] George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
There were also technical issues from an electric buzzing sound in Lennon’s apartment.
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But Sir Paul has long talked about wanting to complete it. “That one’s still lingering around,” he told a documentary in 2012. “So I’m going to nick in with Jeff [Lynne] and do it. Finish it, one of these days.”
Lynne said: “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.”
Sir Paul spoke this week ahead of the launch of his new book and photography exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Titled Eyes Of The Storm, it features portraits taken by Sir Paul of the band between December 1963 and February 1964.
