Now and Then

I rather like the latest/last Beatles record. It has the character and feeling of their early music. 
 
In January 1966 the band were marooned in northern Italy. It was damnably cold and our income from gigs was not matching our outgoings. It couldn’t last and we regretfully called it a day, returning to England through a European winter. Arriving home with £1 in my pocket, having sold my guitar amplifier for petrol money, I had to face the fact that the music business was not for me.
 
I was invited to a party and Rubber Soul was being played endlessly. It was a total and complete catharsis. We had listened to and greatly enjoyed the Help LP in Rome in the late summer of 1965, and later saw the film, appallingly dubbed into Italian. But coming home as a musical failure at the age of twenty and wondering what on earth I could do next, Rubber Soul was a tremendous balm to a severely wounded ego; Now and Then has a very similar feeling to the tracks on that LP.
 
This latest ‘record’ is a true child of the modern age, having used ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to extract John’s voice from a very poor quality cassette tape. And it really appeals to a mouldering old rock and roll fellow like me.

​All balls really, since I’m listening to Wagner’s Parsifal as I write this. Still it is an interesting demonstration of the extraordinary ability of music to affect one’s mood and transport one to a place whose existence had been all but forgotten.