[Susan Foreman]

Originally Posted by Justin101

I knew that here was a 'new' Beatles song coming this week, but what's the story behind it? Where did it come from?

It's all down to Peter Jackson!

From Sky News:

"...The track features John Lennon's vocals and George Harrison's guitar playing and was finished by Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Ringo Starr with the help of audio restoration technology, pioneered for film director Peter Jackson, allowing Lennon's original demo to be cleaned up and used.

...After Lennon's murder in 1980 aged 40, his wife Yoko Ono gave the tape [Here And Now] to the rest of the band, along with rough recordings of Free As A Bird and Real Love, which were reworked and released in the mid-1990s.

During this time, the surviving Beatles members - including George Harrison who died in 2001 - also developed Now And Then but did not release it. They blamed the limited technology that caused problems clearly extracting Lennon's vocals.

But new audio restoration technology has allowed Lennon's original demo to be cleaned up and used, alongside Harrison's electric and acoustic guitar recordings for the song from 1995."