Now and Then (the new UK no 1) and mortality, cynicism, memory and time – a different take on getting older with The Beatles

This is the first of a series of weekly essays for paid subscribers. Once a week, you’ll get a longer read on something around pop culture that has moved, interested, repelled or excited me so much that I’ve decided to sit at the keyboard and write, write, write. This first read goes into my thoughts - mixed and mired in memory – about the ‘return’ of The Beatles, who’ve just scored their first UK number one in 54 years, the music industry’s desires to fix and reassert the past, and Paul McCartney needing to tell us who he is, now and then.

The release of The Beatles’ Now And Then, the band’s first number one in 54 years as of last night, powered by the future shock of AI, has seen me spiralling into the past. To 1996, in fact, when I was a fresh-faced eighteen, the time when you think you’re as old as the hills, worrying moment by moment about your youth slipping away. Days felt long then. Weeks felt longer. The summer holidays stretched into the distance, nuclear-bright, full of time that had to be filled with important, life-changing things. Now, years disappear in seconds – apples bud, blossom, ripen, fall, become food for the worms in the blink of a rheumy eye.

In the present, some music writers weren’t particularly excited to hear a new song by The Beatles last week. One of those writers was me. Even writing this sentence sounds cynical, shruggy, the words of someone who thinks it’s cool to hate a band that so many people find as familiar and comforting as their dearest friends. I’d like to say this, very loudly, right now: that that person isn’t me. I wrote a letter to Paul McCartney on his 80th birthday, for fuck’s sake. I wrote a book about how music shapes our lives, relationships, friendships, in which Paul features in the preface, then chapters two, four, nine, ten and eleven. I am also a sap who cries at records at least three times a week (the last time hearing Johnny Cash singing Will Oldham’s I See A Darkness on an old episode of Desert Island Discs last week). Even thinking of the second side of Abbey Road makes my limbs feel like jelly. Suffice to say, I quite like The Beatles.