A new and final Beatles recording using artificial intelligence will be released later this year, Sir Paul McCartney has announced.
The musician said he had used new technology to “extricate” John Lennon’s voice from an old demo and complete a decades-old song.
“We just finished it up and it’ll be released this year,” he told the Radio 4 Today programme on Tuesday.
Though McCartney did not name the song, it is likely to be a 1978 Lennon composition called Now and Then.
The demo was one of several songs on cassettes labelled “For Paul” that Lennon made shortly before his death in 1980, which were later given to McCartney by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.
It was largely recorded on to a boombox as Lennon sat at a piano in his New York apartment. The lyrics, which begin “I know it’s true, it’s all because of you / And if I make it through, it’s all because of you”, are typical of the apologetic love songs Lennon wrote in the latter part of his career.
The idea to use AI to reconstruct the demo came from Peter Jackson’s eight-hour epic, Get Back. For the documentary, dialogue editor Emile de la Rey used custom-made AI to recognise the Beatles’ voices and separate them from background noise.
