The orchestral scoring session you and Paul did at Capitol Studios in L.A. took place quite a while ago, we know. There’s such a thing as NDAs, but it’s still surprising that that many people could be involved and keep a secret, until Paul himself first spoke about it this spring.
Well, the orchestra didn’t know what they were playing on. They weren’t aware that this was a Beatles recording. I think they thought it was just a Paul McCartney project that I was working with him on. It’s one of those things that I didn’t really think about at the time. I’m thinking about the string arrangement, the players playing the right thing, all that stuff. But they weren’t privy to the information, so they had nothing to hide. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Not in this case: A little knowledge actually worked quite well. But it is funny how we finished this last year, and it hasn’t got out.
Speaking of the orchestral part, why did it feel important to do an orchestral part, in the ultimate expansion of John’s demo? Of course great orchestral parts are a big part of your lineage.
Paul came and played me the track he’d been working on, and I said, “Maybe we should add some strings to it.” He was like, “Well, yeah, we should try it, but I don’t want to make it too corny.” Also, I think he was nervous about us collaborating away from the other Beatles, funnily enough. How much do you add without them? I just said to him, “Why don’t we do something, and then we can always delete it? No one will know.” There’s no teams that hear stuff. It was just me and Paul, at that stage — and Ringo, obviously, and then Sean and Yoko and Olivia. It’s a very small network, so therefore you have that freedom to try things.
With the strings, I thought I might as well rip off my dad — which I did do. My dad was an amazing string arranger. If I’m gonna rip off my dad, you might as well do it for the last Beatles song. There were some times where Paul was like, “We shouldn’t do that, you’re going a bit too far, or “We should try and do this.” Because, even with my dad, even with “Yesterday,” the first string thing (with the Beatles), Paul would have very, very strong ideas about how you want things to sound. And generally, obviously, it’s the Beatles — he’s right. I’m pleased we added the strings. I just wanted it to be as Beatles as possible, basically. I wanted people to listen to this and go, “Yeah, this is a Beatles record.”
The songwriting didn’t seem quite complete in the demo John did that many people have heard. They would say it starts off strong and then loses something along the way. Compositonally, was it Paul’s job to bring it across the finish line?
Completely Paul’s job, as it should be. He wanted to finish this track, and his collaboration with John is, let’s face it, the most successful songwriting collaboration of all time. … What’s interesting is: Someone said, “Paul didn’t really write a middle-eight to it.” And I said, well, he put the guitar solo in [where a bridge might go] as a tribute to George, really. There’s no point in Paul writing a middle section just for the sake of it, so he could write a middle section, which he could have done easily. So that was purely down to him.
I’ll admit that the finished song has a haunting quality to it, thanks to the strings, McCartney’s Harrison-esque slide guitar work, and the nostalgia of hearing John Lennon singing again. Ultimately though, it’s a wisp of a Lennon demo that McCartney and Giles Martin threw the kitchen sink of audio restoration, production and arranging techniques at.
Given the advanced state of audio restoration, I assume Peter Jackson’s crack team will have a go at separating and restoring Lennon’s vocals from “Free as a Bird” and Real Love” from the mid-1990s Anthology sessions (where work on “Now and Then” began, but the technology didn’t yet exist to separate Lennon’s voice from his piano playing) at some point in the future. Meantime, I’m looking forward to hearing Giles Martin’s remixes of the Beatles’ early songs that Jackson’s team were able to generate fresh multitracks when the Beatles’ 1962-1966 greatest hits collection drops next week.