I told George and Ringo I'd agreed to that, they were going, "What? What if we love it?" It didn't come to that, luckily. McCartney, Harrison and Starr then focused their attention on four songs: "Free as a Bird", "Real Love", "Grow Old with Me" and "Now and Then". Of these, they liked "Free as a Bird" the most, and worked hard on it. Eventually the song was released as the first new Beatles single since 1970. The remaining Beatles then turned their attention to "Real Love", which, co-producer Jeff Lynne later remarked, at least "had a complete set of words". Working in the studio With George Martin declining to produce the new recording, the Beatles brought in Electric Light Orchestra's Jeff Lynne, who had worked extensively with Harrison, including as part of the Traveling Wilburys, and had already co-produced "Free as a Bird". The first problem that the team had to confront was the low quality of the demo, as Lennon had recorded it on a hand-held tape recorder. Lynne recalled: We tried out a new noise reduction system, and it really worked. The problem I had with "Real Love" was that not only was there a 60 cycles mains hum going on, there was also a terrible amount of hiss, because it had been recorded at a low level. I don't know how many generations down this copy was, but it sounded like at least a couple. So I had to get rid of the hiss and the mains hum, and then there were clicks all the way through it ... We'd spend a day on it, then listen back and still find loads more things wrong ... It didn't have any effect on John's voice, because we were just dealing with the air surrounding him, in between phrases. That took about a week to clean up before it was even usable and transferable to a DAT master. Putting fresh music to it was the easy part! Although "Real Love" was more complete than "Free as a Bird", which had required the addition of some lyrics by McCartney, the song also suffered from problems with Lennon's timing. Lynne recalled that "it took a lot of work to get it all in time so that the others could play to it." Lynne emphasised that the three remaining Beatles were keen to ensure the song sounded very "Beatles-y": "What we