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Hello listeners, welcome to this new episode.
So this one is a rambling episode, which means it's just me talking on my own in a spontaneous way.
Most of the episode is me talking about the new Beatles song, which is called Now and Then, and you'll hear me telling some stories in relation to the song stories that explain how the song was created, but also stories about the sort of significance or meaning of the song and how it fits into the Beatles story as a whole.
If you want to just skip straight to the Beatles stuff, then I would say skip forwards by about 12 minutes, because I don't actually start talking about the Beatles until about 12 minutes into the episode.
And the rest of it is me talking about why I had to stay at home so that I didn't burn the apartment down and other things like that.
So there's a bit of waffling from me about other things for about 10 minutes or so at the top of the episode.
But then I do get into the Beatles stuff after about 10 minutes.
I don't know which one you're more interested in, really.
Whether you're more interested in hearing me worry about setting fire to my kitchen and talking about my process for making podcast episodes, or if you're more interested in the Beatles.
I mean, there'll be some people who just want the Beatles stuff and some people who are more interested in the other stuff.
But anyway, if you want just the Beatles, skip forward by about 12 minutes.
Okay, right.
So let's have the jingle now and we can start properly.
And here we go.
Hello listeners, welcome back to Luke's English Podcast.
How are you doing today?
I hope you're doing fine.
I'm not in my normal podcasting room today.
I'm recording this in the middle of my living room.
Can you hear the difference?
Does it sound different at all?
Hopefully not.
Hopefully it doesn't make a huge difference.
There might be a bit more reverberation in this room.
But anyway, there it is.
So I'm in my living room.
And I would have recorded this in my podcast room.
I was planning to go there to do a recording this afternoon.
But what happened was I came home after teaching this morning.
I came home to have lunch here.
And then the plan was to go on to my studio office pod room place.
But before I left, I realised I had to prepare some food for dinner.
So this is just the fascinating details of my life here that I'm sharing with you.
And so I realised oh no, before I go out, I need to pre-prepare some food so that when I come back with the kids, I'll be able to just quickly get the food ready and serve it.
You know, this is the forward planning that you need to do as a parent.
Because when I didn't have kids, dinner was just like something you worried about when you needed to eat.
And now I have to plan everything carefully in advance.
Everything has to be carefully thought through.
So I thought, right, I better put some food in the oven now and then it'll be cooked.
And then all I'll need to do later is just reheat it and then serve it.
And that will be done in 15 minutes.
Because if I left it until later, if I decided to do the cooking later, then it would take time.
And then ultimately, my daughter, for example, would eat too late.
And if she eats too late, she goes to bed too late.
And if she goes to bed on a fairly full stomach, like if she hasn't had time to digest her food, then she will just be awake, she won't fall asleep and she'll be up and awake until like 10 o'clock or something and then it'll be really hard to wake her up in the morning.
And that's not the right kind of habit that you need with a five-year-old child.
You need them to go to bed early, get plenty of sleep.
So I put the food in the oven and I set it and I thought I'll put it.
I'll be clever.
I'll put it on a timer.
So I'll set the oven to cook.
And after the timer has gone off, the oven will switch itself off.
I'll be clever.
And then I'll go off to my pod room.
And just as I was doing that, and I was about to leave, and then just a thought occurred to me which was like wait a minute, can you leave?
Can you just leave an oven cooking in an apartment without being there?
What's going to happen?
Because if i do that it's just going to explode, isn't it?
Something's going to happen that i mean, like i've never seen or heard of an oven just catching fire.
Um, so it would be just my luck to set the oven on a timer leave.
That would be the one time in my life that an oven caught fire.
It would be when i wasn't there to deal with it.
So I thought there's no way I'm going to risk that.
In fact, I actually checked it out on the internet.
I just Googled, is it safe to leave an oven on and leave the house?
And a lot of you are probably thinking, no, Luke, no, it's definitely not safe.
Well, I had to Google it just to confirm that.
And I ended up on a page.
Well, the title of the page is, is it safe to leave the oven on and leave the house?
And there's even a picture of an oven with some chicken legs cooking in it, which is exactly the situation I've got.
I'm literally cooking some chicken right now.
I hope you appreciate all these details.
This is a rambling episode.
You know, it's one of those episodes where I'm just going to talk, improvise.
I'm just going to spontaneously speak.
Welcome.
You're welcome, everyone.
I hope you enjoy it.
I hope you listen to all of it.
I've got some things to say to you.
It's not just all about my oven and me trying not to burn my apartment down.
It's not.
But anyway, I'm just giving you context.
So I googled it.
Is it safe to leave the oven on and leave the house?
And the page I found said this.
This is on mybudgetrecipes.com, like some kind of cooking website.
Anyway, it said, if you've ever been in the situation of putting the oven on for dinner only to realise that you need to pop to the shops to get a final ingredient, then you may have considered leaving the oven on and unattended.
However, this is a bad idea.
Ah.
It's unsafe to leave the oven on and leave the house, even if you're only going to be gone for five or 10 minutes.
For me, it would be longer.
It'd be the length of a rambling episode, plus the time I'd need to pick up the kids and come back.
So that's because it only takes seconds.
It takes seconds for an oven to catch fire and cause catastrophic damage to your home.
Research conducted by the New York Fire Department, published in 2020, found that between the years of 2014 and 2018, unattended cooking was by far the leading factor in cooking fires and cooking fire casualties.
In this case, 31 of all fires and 53 of all deaths were were a result of equipment being left unattended.
So that basically gave me the answer I needed, which is like, no, do not leave the oven on.
Even if it's on a timer.
Don't leave the oven on cooking some chicken while you go off and record a podcast in your pod room, because the chances well, there's a slight chance that you'll come back to discover that your life has essentially been burned to the ground.
And I don't really want that to happen, do I?
You know?
I mean, obviously we've got the podcasting room, but I can't house a family of four in the room.
That's basically the size of a cupboard.
So, for many reasons health and safety reasons I've decided to stay at home to record this episode today.
So that's why it might sound a bit different.
And if you're looking at the video version, it looks a bit different.
It's very plain in the background.
You can see just a blank white wall behind me where we haven't put any pictures.
There is still undecorated.
This wall is yet to be decorated behind me.
So it's all very plain and white and I'm wearing a white shirt.
So it's all white.
It's It's like the Beatles' White Album, essentially.
And I've even got.
I do have a bass guitar in the background, which you can see here if you're looking at the video version.
It's a Hofner club bass.
Not the McCartney violin, not the Paul McCartney one, but very, very similar.
And this is the bass guitar that I have at home that I play around with sometimes.
Anyway, hello everyone.
Welcome to this new episode.
And yeah, so this is a rambling episode, essentially.
And I guess you know what that involves.
It just involves me talking spontaneously.
And...
To be honest, I have so many things that I want to talk about, so many things I want to say.
And sometimes I worry that I'm actually giving you too much like, too many episodes, episodes which are quite long.
Too many words, too much talking.
I do worry about that.
And I even worry about the fact that I worry about that.
Is it necessary for me to be concerned that I sort of publish too much I don't know.
Well, the reason I worry about it is because A I kind of think if I publish episodes that are too long, if I publish episodes that are Maybe, if I publish more than one episode a week, then people won't listen to all of it.
Because I know what, you know, your lives are like.
You're busy, right?
Like everyone.
So I'm concerned that people won't listen to all of it.
That you'll be overwhelmed, like, ah, too much, too many words, right?
You'll be overwhelmed by it and ultimately you'll just stop.
You just think well, I didn't finish that episode, so I can't listen to the new episode until I finish the old episode.
And then you don't listen to that old episode and then you're just like I'll go and listen to something else or I'll just do something else.
You know, if I was more business minded, I would make all my podcasting decisions based on audience engagement and metrics.
I'd study the numbers, look at audience retention and decide that my episodes need to be 14 minutes long.
You know.
And if I do anything longer than 14 minutes, then the The ratio of time spent to I don't know what it would be to benefit to me.
That ratio would be all wrong.
And you know, if I was more business oriented or more number focused or whatever, then I would be making my decisions based on those factors.
Also, there are other things like just general wisdom, like always leave them wanting more.
Always leave them wanting more is a phrase that you hear in show business, which is where you should always leave the audience.
You should never give the audience too much, to the point where like oh, you know, you know, you know, I need to be getting back home now.
It's like, oh, I'm a bit tired now.
Instead, you should just leave the audience with that sensation that they always wanted a bit more.
That's where you should end the show.
So that, that wisdom is in my mind.
And also just other phrases like less is more and you know the importance of brevity and stuff like that.
So those things are in my mind.
Um, But I'm not that business-minded, and this is a sort of a passion project for me.
Even possibly a vanity project, which is the more negative side.
If something is a vanity project, it means you're doing it just as an expression of your own vanity.
But anyway, this podcast is many things for me.
It's a professional project. because it's an extension of my teaching career to an extent.
And, you know, it does bring me money as well, of course.
So it's a form of revenue.
I need to do this for my living now.
But also, it's a personal project.
It's always been a very personal project.
It's a sort of form of self-expression for me.
It's a platform for my own creative compulsions and my apparent need for self-expression, or to have a platform for my own voice.
Because Maybe in the rest of my life, I'm not like this in the rest of my life, I promise you.
I'm not going around talking all the time and constantly talking to everyone.
In fact, a lot of the time I kind of take a backseat and do a lot of listening and try to fit in with everyone else's lives.
Like when I'm a teacher, I try not to do too much talking.
Obviously, I have to do some, but I like to give my students plenty of talking time.
Then in family situations and other situations, I try and keep it zipped to an extent.
The podcast is where I let everything come out.
That's another reason why I do this.
Also, that does fit into my whole teaching approach to the podcast, which is that you can learn through listening and that I try to make it personal, to keep the whole thing engaging and Because language learning is blah blah blah blah, blah.
Right.
You see, sometimes I am self-disciplined, despite my compulsion to use this platform to talk and talk, and talk.
So sometimes I am self-disciplined and I hold myself back and I make sure I don't publish too much, you know, and I try to keep things short and sweet and I keep myself in check.
But now, today is not one of those times, okay?
There are just things I want to talk about today.
I feel compelled to talk on the podcast today, even though I do have other episodes which are pretty much done finished, pre-recorded.
I mean, I recorded them before this, and they're ready to be published.
They will be published in due course.
But today, I just want to talk about just certain other things which are just in my brain.
And, you know, that's what I want to do.
Life is short.
I want to enjoy my life today and do the things I feel like doing today.
So I'm going to do a rambling episode.
And what do I want to talk about?
Well, something relatively trivial really, I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, something that's not, you know, all that important, but somehow is worth talking about.
Something nice, I suppose.
It's a good time to be a Beatles fan.
I talked about being in this white room, which is like the Beatles white album.
And I've got my Paul McCartney, kind of Paul McCartney bass next to me.
It's a sort of a time to be a Beatles fan.
I got a comment on my website today.
The comment said.
The comment is from So Amadeo, not Amadeus, not Mozart, because he's dead.
Obviously you know he can't come back from the grave and leave a comment on my website.
No, this is not Amadeus, it's Amadeo.
And he said, or she said, now and then, what do you make of it?
Okay, so this is a reference to the new Beatles song.
So did you know this?
You may have seen this in the news.
The Beatles, last week, published a new song, and it's also their final song.
It's the final Beatles song to be published.
So I wanted to talk about that.
Now, let me stop you there.
If you are one of those people who's like, oh, the Beatles.
He's talking about the Beatles again.
Yeah, let me stop you there.
Okay now I know that for a lot of people you're just not into the Beatles and not interested, because you think that it's just Yellow Submarine and Hey Jude and just four guys in black and white going like that and girls screaming and what's the fuss all about?
I know.
I understand.
I get that, that there's a sort of a common image of the Beatles that you know is that kind of iconic, those iconic images that we always see.
And also although I'm going to talk about the fact that they've released new music, sort of new and old music.
It's kind of an interesting combination of the two.
I don't expect everyone out there to be fans of the music.
In fact, you know, music is something completely personal.
And I'm not here to try and persuade you that Beatle music is, you know, something you should listen to.
That's completely up to you.
And I couldn't persuade you anyway.
But I'm not talking about the music so much as just the human story.
Okay.
And this is always what I find interesting about the Beatles.
It's a fascinating, fascinating story.
And because we know so much about it, because we know so many details about it and about the relationship between the four guys, it does reveal interesting things about, I don't know, the human condition and stuff like that.
So what is this new slash old Beatles song that has been released?
Let me try and tell you the story.
There's two stories here, really.
Two stories within a much larger story.
The much larger story is the one of the Beatles.
It's the Beatles story.
And I've said before on this podcast that I've always wanted to try to tell the Beatles story, but it's too big.
It's just epic.
It's like...
I don't know like the best TV series that's ever been made, but it would be 10 series, you know, and each episode is an hour long, and they would need to go into sufficient detail to really bring the quality out in the story.
Whenever you read the story of the Beatles in a kind of summarised short version, it really glosses over the real heart of it and the really fascinating details.
So I'm going to try and tell you two stories within the greater, larger story of the Beatles.
One of the stories is basically this song how it came to be, the way it was recorded, the way it was created.
And then there's another story which is all about maybe, why this particular song is very special to Paul McCartney.
So, all right, the Beatles, there were four of them.
Now there's just two of them because John Lennon died in 1980.
He was shot by a man in the street.
George Harrison died in 2001.
He died of cancer.
But during that time, he was trying to recover from cancer.
He was attacked as well by a fan who broke into his home and stabbed him.
Horrifying story.
People say that that didn't help him recover from his illness, which obviously you can understand.
Not that he was killed by a fan, but it certainly didn't help.
Anyway, so we lost John in 1980, George in 2001.
The two remaining Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
Obviously they share a bond, the two of them.
That's incredibly close and special.
And they want to work together sometimes.
And so they've managed to work together again to create a new song with John and George as well.
And so this is a special song, not just because it's, as they say, the last Beatles song that we're going to get ever, but also because of the significance of the lyrics, and especially the significance of the title of the song.
Now and Then.
This story I'm going to tell you hopefully will show you one of the reasons why Paul was so moved and so keen to make this recording.
Actually, I think I need to explain the genesis of the song first, right?
So...
The Beatles essentially were together during the 1960s.
They recorded from 1962 and really kind of stopped making music together in around 1970, let's say at which point they went off in their separate directions and got married and led independent lives.
But before they split up they had been incredibly close, living extremely closely with each other, were collaborating artistically and also caught up in the middle of some sort of incredible hurricane of fame and also success, to the point where they got incredibly well-known and elevated to a level that no one had ever really achieved before at the level of popular culture.
And the experience of that really kind of crystallized their friendship, let's say.
So anyway...
They split up.
Now there's.
You know, some people speculate about whether they even really intended to split up or not, or whether just like business and contractual things got in the way.
Various other individuals and different factors came between them.
And there was quite a lot of discord and bad blood going on. especially between John and Paul.
But throughout the 70s, I think they were still extremely close, even though they were apart.
The connection was still there.
And the evidence for that is the fact that they kept singing to each other in their songs.
So there's obviously the breakup period where John, the most obvious example of them singing to each other in their songs is John's song called How Do You Sleep, which is full of, uh.
Very nasty things about paul saying that you know your, your music is is, uh is like music.
You know it's like background music.
It doesn't have any real substance to it.
And how do you sleep, how do you live with yourself?
Really nasty things like the only thing you've ever done is yesterday, which is a kind of a clever joke like the like the best work you've done is in the past, but also the best thing you wrote was that song.
You did that one time, um.
But also Paul had a few digs at John as well, maybe a little bit less obviously in some of his songs.
But then, as their relationship improved despite the fact that they weren't working together, their relationship did improve.
They kind of got over the bad blood that they had between each other.
And there were plans for them to work together.
They were going to record again.
But again, different factors came between them.
Some people say that Yoko was one of those factors.
I don't know.
It's all very complicated.
A lot of psychology involved.
But they were certainly, Paul and John in particular, were certainly very close.
And this is a closeness that went beyond the fact that they were bandmates as well, with Paul and John especially.
Because they had things in common from their childhood that really bonded them together incredibly closely.
A lot of it's to do with the fact that they both lost their mothers when they were in childhood.
Paul lost his mother when he was 14 years old and she died of cancer when he was 14 and he didn't know that it was happening.
His family kind of kept it secret from him to protect him, but he wasn't allowed to understand what was going on.
It's just one day His brother and him were taken to the hospital to see her kind of on her deathbed.
Then later, they were told that she died.
They didn't really know why, what was wrong with her.
It wasn't really properly communicated.
He didn't really have a chance to properly come to terms with it or to express his feelings about it.
He buried his feelings, I think, as a teenager.
Often the stories about Paul are that he had a relatively stable and simple straightforward, loving childhood.
But in fact, when you look at it in more detail, it was very hard.
And there were a lot of things that really probably emotionally scarred him in many ways, like the way he lost his mum and also the way his father reacted to being an only parent.
And apparently his dad, although his dad was a loving father, he also used to hit him.
He used to hit Paul and slap him and punish him.
And John also lost his mother as well, more famously.
You know that he was separated from his mum and then he kind of reconnected with her.
And just as he was sort of building a relationship with her again, she died in an accident.
So Paul and John were already very close because they shared the same musical tastes and they shared a certain outlook on the world and they were both interested deeply in music and so on.
But then, especially when John's mother died, they really became connected to each other in a very deep and very personal way that not many other people could really understand.
Then they went on to have this unbelievable, unique experience in this band uh, rising to a level of international fame which was like dangerous and obviously wonderful to an extent, and it gave them this platform for their music um, and they became cultural sort of uh icons and everything.
But also it must have been at times very frightening and scary, uh disturbing, to be on that level of fame and there were moments when they were afraid of afraid for their lives and and all sorts of things.
So they went through this like incredible experience, like traumatic, life-changing experience where they saw the whole world.
And then they split and they continued to talk to each other through songs.
And famously John Lennon in the mid-70s kind of left the public eye and became a bit of a recluse, living in his New York apartment with Yoko.
They had a son together.
And the...
The usual narrative is that John stopped playing music and focused on family life.
But what actually we know from his diaries and from other sources is that he continued to play music and continue to write songs.
And in 1977, he did actually record himself playing some songs on the piano.
He recorded them on a very basic tape recorder. and wrote the names of the songs on a cassette.
Then, obviously, in 1980, he was shot.
Huge shock.
And that definitely meant that the Beatles would never work together again, even though they probably would have done.
They probably would have come back together in some way.
But this meant that it was never possible ever again.
And Paul must have been absolutely devastated to lose this like, in a sense, in an artistic and fraternal sense, losing a part of himself.
Losing this other half that he had worked with so closely to realise these musical projects.
But that was lost and could never be achieved again.
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But the cassette, right?
The cassette.
And cut to the mid-90s when things were a bit better between...
Yoko and Paul in particular, and John Lennon was posthumously being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame posthumously.
And Paul and Yoko met at the ceremony.
Yoko brought this tape with her with these song titles written on it.
Four songs with a note that said For Paul.
And she gave him the tape and she told him, you know, that John was working on these songs.
Maybe you'd like to do, maybe there's something you can do with them.
And Yoko, at this point, she sort of holds the creative rights to John's work.
So this was her essentially giving Paul her blessing officially to kind of do something with these tapes, to work with these tapes, maybe to finish off the writing work that John had done and to finish them.
So obviously for Paul, this is a great opportunity and George and Ringo as well.
You know we often don't include them in these stories, but that's just hard to tell the stories of four people at the same time.
But especially for Paul, because, you know, he was the direct sort of songwriting partner with John.
So what they did was the three tools, the three remaining Beatles did actually take those tapes and went into the studio with uh, Jeff Lynn, a producer who'd been working with George, and they kind of uh, using the basic um demo that, the demos that John had put down, they added all these other layers.
So they added bass and other guitars and vocals and Ringo's drums, and they produced two songs.
One was called real love.
And the other one was called free as a bird.
Uh, Two songs using the original demos, but then building other parts on top of them.
And they were released as part of the Anthology Project in the mid-90s.
And to listen to them, it's extraordinary, really, to hear them.
They don't really sound like Beatles songs in a way, because they're produced by this guy, Jeff Lynne, who had a very particular way of producing music, with his own unique style.
So you can definitely hear that they are Jeff Lynne productions.
So in a weird way, they don't entirely sound like the Beatles.
And yet they do because it is the four Beatles.
You can hear their voices and their idiosyncrasies.
So there is something kind of surreal and spooky about those songs.
John's voice can be heard, but it's not very clear because it's the original tape recording.
So there was a third song, though.
There was a third song on the tape, which they worked on as well.
But after a while, they abandoned it because George didn't like it.
So they abandoned that.
But that song was called Now and Then.
And Paul had always wanted to go in and finish that song.
Now, why did George not like it?
So it's not clear really whether he just thought the song was a bad song or whether he thought that the sound wasn't good enough.
Because the thing about Now and Then is it's just John and the piano.
The original recording which you can find online.
You can hear the piano, you can hear John's voice, but the voice and the piano are very mixed up together.
There's also other background noises.
Like I think there's a TV set in the background because John always had a TV on in his apartment.
You can maybe hear some traffic noise out of a window and some other background noises.
So there was no clear separation between the voice and the piano and these other background noises.
And so maybe George didn't like it because the sound quality wasn't good enough.
Or maybe just George didn't like the song.
But anyway, it got vetoed. by George.
And that was one of the things about the Beatles is that if one of them didn't like something or if didn't want to do it, then they wouldn't do it.
So they had to have agreement from all four of them.
So George vetoed now and then, and it got put on the shelf.
But I think Paul had always been meaning to go back to it.
And I think for Paul the song was actually very, very special and held special significance for him.
Right.
So I'm now going to tell the story of why that song might have special significance for Paul.
And then I'll talk about the song that was released last week, this final Beatles song.
So, Now and Then is the name of the song.
Why would this have special significance for Paul?
Well, the story goes like this.
And this story is actually told by a guy called Carl Perkins.
Carl Perkins was a legend of American rock and roll music. up there with Elvis Presley.
One of the absolute all-time legends of American rock and roll from the 1950s.
He wrote the song Blue Suede Shoes.
He worked with Elvis occasionally wrote some songs that the Beatles actually recorded on some of their albums.
The Beatles adored him.
They looked up to him as a musician who's a huge influence on so many people.
So an absolute legend of rock and roll.
Anyway, Carl Perkins is the one who tells this story.
So in 1981, this is less than a year after John had been killed and Paul was grieving his death.
Paul was recording a new album.
So it's the first music that he'd made after John died.
And Paul was recording it in Montserrat, which is a Caribbean island.
And on that island, George Martin, this music producer who worked with the Beatles.
George Martin had a studio there.
So Paul was recording this new album with George Martin at the studio.
And he invited Carl Perkins to come to play guitar on one of the songs.
Okay, so Carl is invited over to Montserrat.
He comes and stays for a week.
And Paul's there with his wife Linda and the kids and stuff.
And so Carl was invited over and he stayed for about a week and worked on the song.
And Carl had such a wonderful time.
He was so moved and touched by the generosity and kindness and welcoming nature of Linda and Paul.
He was so moved and enjoyed it so much that he wrote a song for Paul and Linda.
To express his feelings.
And the song is kind of a slow country ballad.
And it sort of contains lyrics like, you know, thank you so much for your kindness.
You made me feel like I can carry on again.
I don't know what Carl had been going through in his life at the time, but...
He certainly felt very moved by the kindness that Paul and Linda had shown him.
You know, you've made me feel like I can carry on again.
And the last line of the song is something like this.
And if we never see each other again, old friend, think about me every now and then.
Okay.
So Carl plays this song to Paul and Linda on the day that he is going to leave the island.
So just before he goes to the airport, he plays them the song that he's written.
And if we never see each other again, old friend, think about me every now and then.
Paul and Linda love the song.
And Paul, when he hears that last line, is moved to tears.
He can't stop crying.
He has to leave the room because he's crying.
And so he goes and stands outside to let the tears flow.
And Linda, Paul's wife, says to Carl... you know, that was a beautiful song.
Thank you so much.
And, you know, it's good that he's crying because he really needs to do this.
He hasn't really been able to let the feelings out.
He hasn't really been able to cry.
So this is, you know, it's good that he's able to do this.
Thank you so much for the song.
And then she said to him, But how did you know?
How on earth did you know?
And Carl didn't know what Linda was talking about.
So he said, what do you mean?
How did I know what?
And she said, how did you know those words, the words you sang in the song?
Only Paul and I, we're the only ones who know about that.
How did you know that?
And Carl sort of said, I've got no idea what you're talking about.
And Linda said well those words at the end of your song.
Those are the last words that John Lennon ever said to Paul McCartney.
And Carl had no idea.
It was a complete coincidence.
But a very strange, almost supernatural coincidence, really, when you think about it.
And obviously it moved Paul so much.
And that's why those words every now and then, or at least now and then, have special significance for Paul.
Because the last time he saw John, apparently, when he visited him at his New York apartment...
When Paul left, apparently John did say those words to him.
He said something along the lines of, think about me every now and then.
And so that's very powerful.
You can understand why Paul loves that so much.
And actually, when you listen to this song Now and Then listen to the lyrics, start to wonder who is this song really about?
Especially when you consider the fact that Paul and John used to sing to each other almost encoded messages.
Like for example, there's one song from John's last album, which is called Double Fantasy.
He recorded it with Yoko.
One of the songs on the album is called Just Like Starting Over.
And on the face of it, it seems to be a song about kind of rekindling the relationship with Yoko.
You know, it's going to be like we're just starting over.
But a lot of the lyrics seem to be references to Paul.
So, for example, one of the lines is, it's time we spread our wings and fly.
Don't let another day go by, my love.
It'll be just like starting over.
And so wings...
Another Day and My Love.
These are all Paul McCartney references.
Wings was the band that Paul set up after the Beatles.
Another Day is one of his famous songs.
And My Love, another one of Paul's famous songs.
So what's going on here?
Is John singing about Paul?
And there's plenty of other examples of this too.
Some people even speculate that a song like Jealous Guy, which again appears to be a song for Yoko, that actually that might be a song for Paul as well.
Apologising to him, essentially for sort of being nasty, being jealous, you know.
Very complex song.
But fascinating sort of endlessly fascinating to look into the psychodrama of what was going on between these people.
So anyway, so now and then is the song.
So. the song which was abandoned in the 90s.
But then more recently, AI technology has made it possible to do many more things than we could do before.
So especially the work by Peter Jackson yeah, the guy who directed The Lord of the Rings.
He worked on a documentary which was released what was it two years ago I think?
The Get Back documentary.
And that one essentially was... Here's another story.
So in the late 60s, the Beatles started this project, this ridiculously ambitious project, which was to record an album and prepare for a concert and make a film all at the same time.
So they had a studio space and they filmed themselves writing, practicing and recording. songs.
And the idea is that the whole thing would culminate in a big performance.
In the end, they did the performance on the roof of the building.
And the resulting documentary was released.
And after something like 60 hours of footage, 60 hours of recorded video and audio, the film that was released was only about 90 minutes long.
And it didn't really do justice to the footage that was available.
So anyway...
The problem with the footage was that the quality was not very good and there was a lot of missing audio and the quality of the audio wasn't great.
But Peter Jackson, having worked on other projects before, restoring old video and audio footage...
He had the technology to restore this stuff really, really well.
And so he used it on this old video and audio footage of the Beatles recording and managed to do really clever things like separating.
This is what AI can do, right.
It's one of the many things that AI can do, artificial intelligence.
It can actually take...
What an example of this, right?
There's a scene in the Get Back documentary where Paul and John are having a really sort of in-depth conversation about what they're going to do with the band.
And The recording was done with a secret microphone, a microphone that the film director had planted, had put in a plant pot.
So it was kind of like a secret microphone that the guys didn't even realise was recording them.
And it was in the cafeteria of the music studio.
And so there was lots of other background noise.
There's other people talking in the background and there's the sound of plates and cutlery being put away.
So the loud noise is banging and crashing noises in the background of the kitchen.
And so all this very noisy stuff on this old audio recording.
But Peter Jackson used the AI to strip away all of the other extraneous noises and just to isolate John and Paul's voices so we can finally actually hear that conversation.
It's a really fascinating conversation.
If you're interested in the, you know the story of the Beatles and stuff, um and uh.
So this technology is available.
He also used it to isolate uh, the uh, you know guitars and drums and keyboards and vocals from the audio recordings and make them all sound really good.
Okay, and so he.
So now the technology is available to isolate these instruments and voices.
And so Paul and Ringo decided, with the agreement of Yoko you know the John Lennon estate, that's Yoko and her son Sean, and also George Harrison's estate, that's George Harrison's widow, his wife and their son.
With their blessing, Paul and Ringo decided to work on this track that they'd had to abandon in the 90s, but now they had the technology to go to fix it.
And there's a documentary which you can see on YouTube, a kind of short documentary put together by Peter Jackson again, which explains kind of how they did it, how they isolated John's vocal.
So they managed to get rid of the piano sound, get rid of the other background noises and just isolate the vocal.
And it's very spooky.
You hear just the vocal and it's really clearly just John's voice.
And so Paul worked with this, with the vocal and he actually recorded a new piano part.
They took some of the guitar recordings that George had recorded back in the 90s when they first worked on the song, and included those in the track.
Ringo played drums on it.
Paul and Ringo added vocals.
There's still traces of George's background vocals as well, I think, as well as John's vocal.
And they've created, crafted a new song from it.
And maybe the most striking thing is the fact that you can hear John's voice so clearly.
And it doesn't sound like the ghost of the past or something.
It does sound very fresh and clear.
And I mean, the song itself is... I don't... You know, it's not like the best...
Beatles song ever.
It's fairly straightforward, a fairly simple song with a few maybe unexpected melody lines and a couple of unexpected chord changes.
But it's very moving to be able to hear this final sort of collaboration.
And when you think about the subtext of the song, that maybe it's John actually singing for Paul, telling him that he misses him.
It's actually very sweet, isn't it?
And that's what the Beatles story is about really.
It's about love and friendship.
And what's wrong with that?
Nothing.
In fact, it's rather beautiful.
So there you go.
That's what I wanted to talk about.
I don't know why that was important, but I just needed to get that off my chest.
I needed to tell that story.
I hope that you've enjoyed this episode.
I don't know.
What do you think?
You can let me know in the comments section about that.
All right.
I'm just going to stop now.
That's enough rambling.
But thank you so much for listening to this.
And I'll be back with new episodes coming soon.
But leave your comments in the comments section, okay?
Just leave your thoughts.
If you're not a Beatles fan, Did you listen all the way to the end of this?
Did you stick it through all the way to the end despite not really knowing any of the things I'm talking about?
If you are a Beatles fan, you can tell me what you think of the song and about the stories that go along with it and stuff.
Tell me if there's anything I've missed, any important details that I didn't include.
I'm sure there are other I'll probably later on realise sort of things, very profound things that I could have said, but those things escape me now.
But anyway I'll leave like on the website page for this episode, I'll put videos of the documentary, the short documentary by Peter Jackson about the making of the song.
I'll also probably include the videos of Carl Perkins telling that story about how he wrote the song.
And he didn't realize that the last line of the song also happened to be the last thing that John had ever said to Paul.
That's that extraordinary coincidence.
I'll leave those videos there and some other things as well.
And the song itself, of course.
Okay.
But yeah, thanks for listening.
And yes, look, my oven didn't actually catch fire or explode or anything.
So that's nice, isn't it?
That's good.
My apartment didn't burn down.
Maybe it would have been okay to do this in my podcasting room.
But anyway, it makes a change, doesn't it, to be in a different place?
It does.
All right.
Speak to you again soon.
All right.
But for now, it's time to say goodbye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to Luke's English Podcast.
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