The late John Lennon’s son has spoken about how tough it was to see his father play at Glastonbury after his passing alongside Sir Paul McCartney.
Through the wonders of video and artificial intelligence, Lennon was brought back to life to sing a duet of the 1969 song “I’ve Got A Feeling” with Sir Paul, who performed an incredible three-hour concert at the summer festival in June.
The captivating trick was the invention of Peter Jackson, who used machine learning technology to separate John Lennon’s voice from decades-old recordings and then arranged them to simulate a live performance.
Jackson is well known for his work on the Beatles documentary Get Back.
It stunned me, said Julian, 59, whose mother was John Lennon’s first wife Cynthia. “I saw it on YouTube and I sort of went: “Errrr… I don’t know whether I’m okay with that,” Julian added.
When his father was shot and died in December 1980, Julian was 17 years old.
But by the time Glasto came around at the end of June, two months had gone since the American concert, so Julian made the difficult decision to swallow his pride and attend Sir Paul’s performance in the English countryside.
He said that he had now come to terms with the idea of seeing his father perform on a large screen, saying, “I genuinely loved it.”
When Sir Paul performed a week after turning 80, he set a record for the Worthy Farm Festival’s oldest headlining act ever.
His lengthy performance featured duets with John Lennon that mesmerised the packed house, as well as appearances by Bruce Springsteen and Foo Fighters member Dave Grohl.
The Lord of the Rings director ackson, on the other hand, spoke about how he was able to use contemporary technology to make it possible for Lennon to perform after his death, but he was unwilling to provide many details.
The New Zealander said, “We constructed a machine learning system that we taught what a guitar sounds like, what a bass sounds like, and what a vocal sounds like.”
In actuality, we instructed the computer on how to mimic the sounds of Paul and John.
Jackson is believed to have used similar methods and specially created artificial intelligence to create the Get Back documentary on The Beatles, separating background noise, musical instruments, and speech from the original mono recordings to allow editors to use footage that would have otherwise been unusable.
After the touching duet at Glastonbury, which received a lot of positive feedback from the audience, Sir Paul said, “That is really precious for me.” I’m aware it’s digital. I can see myself singing with John once again; we’re back together.