The new Beatles song and the last- Now and Then.

The new Beatles song and the last- Now and Then.

It almost feels as if time has stood still and nobody had noticed. It was one of those moments when the past makes a fleeting visit and then retreats to exactly the point it came from. It is an old Beatles song that had been left presumably in the bottom of a chest of drawers, apparently forgotten and completely neglected. It was assumed that the Beatles had never intended it for to be released as either a single or album track but that's what happened.

Perhaps it had been discovered rusting away in a dusty mahogany cabinet, perhaps a Victorian davenport where rotting papers and documents are normally stashed away if only we suppose that nobody will ever find them again. There lies the song, a mass of drafts, rewrites, corrections, heavily edited perhaps but who knew what fate would befall it before the public finally got around to hearing it? They've been waiting for this moment with bated breath and they now find themselves in a state of fevered animation and anticipation.

You're pleasantly surprised but words are somehow inadequate. What to do with a song by the most famous boy band in the world? You just roll with it and just get on with the business of promoting it in the way it used to be played on the radio stations of the age. For today is the day the Beatles make a dramatic comeback, the greatest resurrection since the last time an old Beatles record was found and then criminally overlooked. 

In 1978 John Lennon, undoubtedly one of the finest and most expressive of all musical wordsmiths, the best of the best, wrote a song called 'Now and Then'. It's out there for public consumption, ready to be analysed and scrutinised, picked apart and eventually deconstructed. The record shops are waiting for the first lorry load, a piece of music so enchanting and extraordinary that you can hardly believe this is happening.

Music has always manifested itself in different genres but the Beatles were years ahead of the rest and always innovative. They made music that stunned the senses, gripped all the most tender emotions and then became so thought provoking and sensational that it was somehow beyond any categorisation. The Beatles embraced the 1960s in much the way that George Harrison mastered the sitar or Paul McCartney the piano and guitar and Ringo Starr pounded the drums with such vigorous authority.

On first hearing it does sound as if the whole composition was played against a backdrop of a local pub where the clink of glasses suddenly subside and the barman demands quiet. But this of course is the worst of all comparisons and only now can we appreciate its flawless genius. Throughout Now and Then, we are entertained by what can only be described as an old Steinway piano that Russ Conway would have modelled most of his repertoire on. And yet this is surely doing a grave disservice to Now and Then because this record just smacks of glorious originality and freshness. 

There is an attention to detail that is just immaculate. Now and Then has an old fashioned charm and a nostalgic value that can't be defined. Now and Then is by, to all outward appearances, sad, reflective and wistfully yearning for a future that can never be imagined. Any parallels with Yesterday are purely coincidental since this is not a morbid dirge or some solemn homage to yesteryear when the Second World War left so many painful and harrowing memories. It is uplifting and moving.

But then the boys from Merseyside exploded onto a hitherto thriving Mersey beat scene that had already seen the likes of Gerry and the Pacemakers and Cilla Black insinuate themselves into the public affections. And so the Beatles were born after toiling their way to recognition as the Quarrymen. There was John, at first shy and impudent at times with pudding basin hair, Paul, pudding basin hair, naturally descriptive on the written page, George, pudding basin hair with thoughts turning to mysticism and Hare Krishna.

For the entire decade spanning the whole of the 1960s the Beatles were prodigiously creative, endlessly inventive, thrillingly imaginative and almost unstoppable. The songs and singles were lyrical masterpieces of breath taking ingenuity, smashing down boundaries, always headline makers, stepping off planes in exotic climes and surrounded by hysterically screaming girls. The albums rapidly followed and then the global tours of feverish stadiums packed to capacity.

There was the aforementioned Yesterday, wallowing in past glories, Hey Jude, a homage to Julian Lennon while asleep in his cot, Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paperback Writer and Back in the USSR, an obvious reference to Soviet Union and always a country shaped by revolution. There was Get Back, the beautifully eccentric Yellow Submarine where Ringo thought the band had reached a horrible nadir, its lowest point, a time of struggle and transition. There was the Benefit of Mr Kite, all circus riffs and spell binding sound effects, Let it Be and the hugely under rated but exceptional A Day in the Life.

But now we have Now and Then which has more or less dumbfounded us with its suddenness and quaintness. It is the Beatles doing what they do best, style icons from the moment they first jumped onto a Cavern stage and made us all bop and bounce up and down with a vitality we never knew we had. It is a throwback to an age when the Mods met the Rockers on Brighton sea front and Bank Holiday weekends in Britain would never be the same.

It went back to a time when the fashions of Mary Quant and Twiggy symbolised everything that was right on and fashionable during the 1960s and Radio Caroline, pirate radio pioneers, defied the authorities quite vehemently at times. It was that decade that introduced to us things we would never have seen before and then regretted their passing because they were potentially brilliant. It was an age of discovery and positive experimentation, Harold Wilson's White Heat of Technology, breakthroughs, astonishing space missions and always turbulent politics from which Wilson seemed to have escaped unscathed.

And so to Now and Then, the new Beatles single that none of us had heard before. In the old days you would have waited patiently in case they'd sold out of the 45 vinyl. Whether it be HMV, your local record shop a new record by the Beatles had to be acquired, it was a must for your growing collection of singles and albums, gold dust or so it seemed. You treasured a Beatles disc because it would certainly have a sentimental importance and live long in the memory. 

Now though, Now and Then will pass into the annals of music history as the last Beatles single ever made by these Liverpool legends. You're reminded of the reasons why the Fab Four simply chucked in the open air stadium gigs, the insistence that they were all going slowly deaf and why the Shea stadium in New York would be their last meeting place. 

You remember the fatherly and intellectually gifted George Martin, guru, guide and inspirational figure to the Beatles. Here was a man who seemed to spend most of his life at Abbey Road recording studio without batting an eyelid or tiring, dedicated and wholly focused on the job at hand. But above all you remember the likely lads from Liverpool who one day got together and changed the face of popular music for ever more.