Now, Then, Anytime

When I started my occasional series Listen To The Band back in March 2021 the first band that I featured was The Beatles. For someone of my generation this seemed the natural choice. They had stormed into the pop world shortly after my ninth birthday, when I was beginning to take a real interest in music, and changed the face of popular music in a way that felt revolutionary after the dreary crooning that had gone before. Unless you have been on a package holiday to Alpha Centauri for the past couple of weeks you can hardly have failed to notice a new release from the band. This one:

The story behind that is that in late 1994 Yoko Ono gave the then three surviving Beatles a cassette tape that John had recorded of three songs. They worked on these from February 1995 and two of them – Real Love and Free As A Bird – were released both as singles and on the Anthology 1 and Anthology 2 albums. They couldn’t complete the third song, however, as the technology available then couldn’t deal with separating the vocals on the tape from the piano track. But fast forward 27 years, and the system that Peter Jackson developed for his Get Back documentary series was brought into play with the now remaining two, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and they managed to complete the song. It was released on Friday 3 November – ten hours before the weekly update for the UK charts – and entered at #42 on the basis of that short period. Needless to say, it went to #1 last Friday, also making #7 in the US. This is a better outcome than the two previous songs managed: Free As A Bird made #2 here and #6 in the US, Real Love got to #4 and #11 respectively. The video I have just played has had over 29m views in twelve days – I think it safe to say that there is still a huge amount of interest around the band. A 12 minute documentary of the making of the song was also released, and has accumulated more than 6.5m views. I’m sharing it here too, if you want to know more:

These were followed up last Friday by expanded and remastered versions of the albums 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, better known as the Red Album and the Blue Album. The original double albums have a combined additional 21 tracks, including Now And Then, and are absolute heaven for a fan such as me! So far there have only been audio versions of some of the remastered tracks issued, but there have been new videos for several of the songs on the two albums in recent years, so I thought I’d play some of those for you. Last year saw the release of the remastered super mega ginormous humongous deluxe version of the Revolver album, and several new videos were issued at the time. This is one:

And here’s another:

I think those are both great, and add a whole new dimension to my enjoyment of songs I have loved for nearly sixty years. The same treatment had previously been given to another song from the album too. It is an obvious one, seeing as it is the title song for an animated movie:

Isn’t that fun? It was released in December 2017 and has just shy of 99m views, so it is definitely still popular!

In closing, here is one from a different album – Abbey Road – that might at first seem a less likely candidate for an animation, but I think it works really well:

That video was released in June 2018, and has more than 123m views. Those figures are really why I am giving you this post: great music will always have its place, and the use of modern day technology to enhance our enjoyment of it is something I applaud. I recall one of my daughters asking me about The Beatles, probably around 1999 or 2000, and when I asked her why she was interested she replied that they were studying that period at school in history lessons – talk about making me feel old! But you only have to look at things like Paul McCartney’s performance at Glastonbury a couple of summers ago to recognise that people who weren’t even born when oldies like me were enjoying Beatlemania can appreciate and enjoy Beatles’ music: the crowd was singing along with many of the songs, and not just the “na na na na na na na” bit.

The weather here today is utterly miserable, but I have really cheered myself up by playing these videos. I hope they have the same effect for you. That’s what music can do, isn’t it, and is why I play a lot of it!

See you again for Song Lyric Sunday 🎶😊