One day after the last new Beatles song, “Now and Then,” was released, the accompanying video, directed by Peter Jackson, has made its debut.
The video brings the band back together — using new and old footage in studio and on stage.
“To be honest, just thinking about the responsibility of having to make a music video worthy of the last song The Beatles will ever release produced a collection of anxieties almost too overwhelming to deal with,” Jackson said in a statement.
The video opens in a studio on closeups of guitar tuning. A cassette tape is put in a recorder, and away it goes.
Images of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are seen, sometimes interacting with their older/younger selves.
The music video is Jackson’s first. He directed the recent docuseries “Get Back,” which chronicled the recording of the band’s final album. He also was part of the team that pioneered the audio technique behind the single itself.
“My lifelong love of The Beatles collided into a wall of sheer terror at the thought of letting everyone down,” Jackson said. “This created intense insecurity in me because I’d never made a music video before, and was not able to imagine how I could even begin to create one for a band that broke up over 50 years ago, had never actually performed the song, and had half of its members no longer with us.”
While AI was used to help isolate Lennon’s original demo vocals for the track, Jackson was insistent on not turning to CGI to recreate the band.
“A Beatles music video must have great Beatles footage at its core,” he said. “There’s no way actors or CGI Beatles should be used. Every shot of The Beatles needed to be genuine.”
