Sir Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence has enabled a 'final' Beatles song

Sir Paul McCartney has confirmed the “final Beatles record” will be released later this year with help from AI technology and a famed Kiwi director.

The song’s title was not given by McCartney when he spoke to BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, although it is most likely Now And Then, a 1978 John Lennon song.

Though he did not name what song it will be, it is likely to be a 1978 Lennon composition Now and Then. The demo was one of several songs on cassettes labelled “For Paul” that John made shortly before his death in 1980, which were later given to Paul by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.

When the Beatles were creating their career-spanning Anthology series in 1995, Now And Then had already been discussed as a potential “reunion song” for them. Two tracks off that cassette, Free As A Bird and Real Love, were polished by producer Jeff Lynne and published in 1995 and 1996, making them the Beatles’ first “new” songs in 25 years.

Additionally, the group tried to record Now And Then, a love song that was typical of John's later work, but the session was quickly abandoned, Paul told Radio 4.

Paul later revealed the song was shelved because George Harrison had called it “fucking rubbish” and refused to work on it.

“It didn’t have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it,” he told Q Magazine. “[But] George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”

There were also said to have been technical issues with the original recording, which featured a persistent "buzz" from the electrical circuits in John's apartment.

Paul has consistently talked about his longing to finish the track and told BBC he was afforded the opportunity with the help of AI and a Kiwi icon.

Famed New Zealand director Sir Peter Jackson originally used the technology while creating Get Back, where dialogue editor Emile de la Rey trained computers to recognise the Beatles’ voices and separate them from background noises. This helped create “clean” audio.

“He [Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” Paul told Radio 4.

“We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar’.

“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI.”

Paul, who was speaking before the launch of a new book and accompanying photography exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, said some applications of AI did give him cause for concern.

“I’m not on the internet that much but people will say to me: ‘Oh, yeah, there’s a track where John’s singing one of my songs,’ and it’s just AI … it’s kind of scary but exciting because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads.”

Paul has not revealed the release date of the song but said it would be later this year.

We can't wait for the new song to be released!