With the release of The Beatles’ final song, Now and Then, just hours away, my excitement – and I really do feel excitement – is tempered by what I know will happen when the song finally sees the light of day. “Is that it?” ‘Why did they bother?” “It’s crap” and so on. I’m cynical enough to believe that some people are rubbing their hands together, just desperate to say what a disappointment this ‘new’ song is and I really shouldn’t let it bother me, but I know it will.
As I quote endlessly, my friend, the great drummer Joe Vitale, once told me, “Without The Beatles, none of us would be here“, which is to say that rock/pop music – call it what you will – would be nothing like it is today without John, Paul, George and Ringo. And of course he’s right. Every musician from nearly every genre owes the Fab Four an enormous debt.
It’s true to say that things were very different in the 1960s, in both life in general and in this instance music in particular. Back then, the release of a new Beatles song was something that people waited for, almost with bated breath. For much of their career, the only radio we had was the BBC Light programme, Radio Luxembourg which drifted in and out with the wind and the Pirate stations which were more often out than in. There was of course no internet and so no social media. If you heard there was a new Beatles song to be issued, you’d be by the radio waiting to hear it for the first time. Never, once, did they disappoint.
And so at 2.00pm on Craig Charles’s excellent BBC 6 Music show Now And Then will be revealed to a waiting world, or at least the part of it which still feels a kind of child wonderment at something so special.
The Beatles were, and remain, underrated. You don’t have to like their music, although you’d surely struggle not to like at last some of it, but you simply cannot deny its greatness, even though for those of you aged under 53 you have never lived in the same world as a band who split up in 1970. 2.00pm cannot come soon enough for me.
