AI has recreated John Lennon’s voice so that “the last ever Beatles record” can be released, Sir Paul McCartney revealed.
Lennon’s chorus was pulled from a “ropey old cassette” with AI recreating a verse so producers could “get it pure” for what he said will be the final song from the Fab Four.
Sir Paul did not name the song, but it is believed to be a 1978 Lennon song called Now And Then, the last of the three planned songs to be recreated after Free As A Bird and Real Love made it onto The Beatles compliation Anthology.
Sir Pau was handed the demo from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono. It was one of several songs on a cassette labelled “For Paul” that Lennon had made shortly before his assasination in 1980.
He told Martha Kearney on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that AI is an “interesting thing” and “something that we’re all sort of tackling at the moment” and trying to deal with.
“When Peter Jackson did the film (The Beatles) Get Back, where it was us making the Let It Be album, he was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano. He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a 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 that we worked on and we just finished it up. It will be released this year.
“We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would do. It gives you some sort of leeway.”
He said the record was originally abandoned when George Harrison refused to play on it describing the ballad as “rubbish” at the time.
“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,” Sir Paul told Q Magazine.
“[But] George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
Sir Paul added there is a “good side” to AI but also a “scary side”.
“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, you know?
“It’s kind of scary but exciting, because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads.”
“We will just have to see where that leads,” he said.
