Sir Paul McCartney has cleared up a bit of confusion surrounding the use of AI in The Beatles’ last ever song (Picture: Samir Hussein/WireImage)
Sir Paul McCartney has cleared up some ‘confusion’ surrounding The Beatles’ final ever song – due to be released this year – which was said to be made using AI technology.
Of course, the only remaining Beatles are Sir Paul, 81, and 82-year-old Ringo Starr, as George Harrison died in 2001 aged 58 from lung cancer, and John Lennon was famously murdered back in 1980 aged 40.
So it was a bit of a shock when it was announced The Beatles would be releasing another song with John Lennon’s vocals, set to be their final ever one.
When making the announcement on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Sir Paul explained how he and Peter Jackson extracted Lennon’s voice from ‘ropey’ cassettes and technology for the film Get Back.
‘He could separate them with AI. He’d tell the machine, “That’s the 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 [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI.
Paul and Ringo Starr are the only remaining Beatles after George Harrison died in 2001, and John Lennon was murdered in 1980 (Picture: Getty Images)
Lennon’s vocals will be heard on the new Beatles song (Picture: Cummings Archives/Redferns)
‘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?’ he added.
‘It’s kind of scary but exciting because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads.’
But now, Sir Paul has cleared up what he called ‘confusion’ about the use of AI in the new song, as he explained nothing has been ‘artificially or synthetically’ created.
The star explained how they simply ‘cleaned up some existing recordings’ in a ‘process which has gone on for years.’
Now Paul has clarified none of the vocals have been ‘artificially or synthetically created’ (Picture: Getty Images)
‘Been great to see such an exciting response to our forthcoming Beatles project,’ the Hey Jude hitmaker began in a Tweet, before continuing: ‘No one is more excited than us to be sharing something with you later in the year.
‘We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about it. Seems to be a lot of guess work out there.
‘Can’t say too much at this stage but to be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created.
‘It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings – a process which has gone on for years.
‘We hope you love it as much as we do. More news in due course – Paul.’
The song is thought to be titled Now and Then, a previously promised love song penned by Lennon before his death in 1980.
It was said the song was originally scrapped because there were missing verses and Harrison dubbed the song ‘rubbish’ during previous recording attempts.
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‘We hope you love it as much as we do.’