The Beatles release music video for ‘final song’ – which Peter Jackson was ‘reluctant’ to direct

The music video for The Beatles’ “final song”, featuring unreleased footage of the band, has been released.

The track, Now And Then, was released yesterday and features all four Beatles. Now the music video, directed by three-time Oscar winner Peter Jackson, has given fans unseen footage of the legendary band’s early days.

Now And Then was initially written and recorded by John Lennon in the late 1970s and later developed by the other band members, including George Harrison, in 1995.

Limited technology meant they were unhappy with the sound quality and did not release the single.

However, new audio restoration technology, pioneered by Jackson, allowed Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Ringo Starr to finish the song more than four decades after the first recording.

The song was released yesterday as a double A-side with a remastered version of the band’s 1962 debut single Love Me Do and cover art by US artist Ed Ruscha.

There have already been almost five million streams of the audio version of Now And Then on YouTube, with other fans listening on streaming sites like Spotify and Apple Music.

Jackson revealed in a statement on The Beatles’ website that he was “very reluctant” to create the accompanying music video.

“To be honest, just thinking about the responsibility of having to make a music video worthy of the last song The Beatles will ever release, produced a collection of anxieties almost too overwhelming to deal with,” he said.

“My lifelong love of The Beatles collided into a wall of sheer terror at the thought of letting everyone down.

“This created intense insecurity in me, because I’d never made a music video before, and was not able to imagine how I could even begin to create one for a band that broke up over 50 years ago, had never actually performed the song, and had half of its members no longer with us.

“It was going to be far easier to do a runner.”

Jackson said in the end it took him so long to “figure out a good reason for turning The Beatles down” that he “never actually agreed” to make it. He just got “swept along”.

“I knew The Beatles don’t take no for an answer if their minds are set on something.”

The filmmaker was supplied with “a few precious seconds of The Beatles performing in their leather suits, the earliest known film of The Beatles and never-seen-before”.

The video shows the Beatles acting “relaxed, funny and rather candid” and Jackson hopes it will “bring a few tears to the eye”.

He also received more than 14 hours of footage from the 1995 recording sessions.

Jackson added: “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.”

The release of the music video comes as Beatles super fans queued overnight at a special launch event in Liverpool to get their hands on a vinyl copy of Now And Then.

And it was none other than John Lennon – a Beatles fan who changed his name by deed poll from Alan Williams in April 2022 – who bought the first copy of the newly released track in the early hours of Friday morning.

Next Friday, two albums – remastered and expanded versions of the 1962-66 and 1967-70 collections – will also be released.

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Speaking in a documentary released on Friday about the recording of Now And Then, Sir Paul said: “How lucky was I to have those men in my life and to work with those men so intimately and to come up with such a body of music?

“To still be working on Beatles music in 2023 – wow.

“Now And Then, it’s probably like the last Beatles song. And we’ve all played on it, so it is a genuine Beatles recording.”