Peter Jackson’s music video for ‘Now and Then’ features amazing unseen footage of The Beatles

A new track by The Beatles was released this week titled Now and Then, and Peter Jackson has directed the beautiful video for the song.

A new Beatles song isn’t something you hear every day. But this week, Now and Then was released, featuring a vocal recorded by John Lennon in the 1970s, and worked on by surviving Beatles Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr back in 1995 as part of The Beatles Anthology Project.

The poor quality of that original recording meant the song went unfinished, however – until now. As while working on the Get Back documentary, director Peter Jackson and his team created a software system that could fix the issues by uncoupling Lennon’s vocals from his piano part.

The result was that the song was completed, and released today with a video directed by Jackson himself.

Peter Jackson’s music video for ‘Now and Then’ features amazing unseen footage of The Beatles

Here’s the video for ‘Now and Then,’ which is the final new release by The Beatles:

Peter Jackson spoke to TheBeatles.com about pulling together this historic clip. “When Apple asked me to make the music video, I was very reluctant,” Jackson explains. “I thought my next few months would be a hell of a lot more fun if that tricky task was somebody else’s problem, and I could be like any other Beatles fan, enjoying the night-before-Christmas anticipation as the release of a new Beatles song and music video approached.”

The super-fan couldn’t turn down an offer from the Fab Four however, but told the surviving members of the band that he’d need special and unseen footage to make the project work. Which they duly delivered.

“Paul and Ringo shot footage of themselves performing and sent that to me,” Jackson reveals. “Apple unearthed over 14 hours of long forgotten film shot during the 1995 recording sessions, including several hours of Paul, George, and Ringo working on ‘Now And Then,’ and gave all that to me. Sean [Lennon] and Olivia [Harrison] found some great unseen home movie footage and sent that. To cap things off, a few precious seconds of The Beatles performing in their leather suits, the earliest known film of The Beatles and never seen before, was kindly supplied by [former Beatles drummer] Pete Best.

“Watching this footage completely changed the situation – I could see how a music video could be made. Actually, I found it far easier if I thought of it as making a short movie, so that’s what I did… My lack of confidence with music videos didn’t matter anymore if I wasn’t making one.”

You can read Jackson’s full description of structuring and editing the video here, but he signs off by stating: “Having got to the end, I’m very happy I’m not waiting for the release of somebody else’s ‘Now And Then’ music video. I have genuine pride in what we made, and I’ll cherish that for years to come.”

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