Mojo mag had a first listen to "Little Girl," the previously unheard John Lennon demo to be included in the upcoming Rubber Soul special editions.
Details:
Recorded in 1965, Little Girl is a John Lennon demo of a song that was never completed with his bandmates. A recording that was such a closely guarded secret that even the most ardent Fabs watchers weren’t aware it even existed.
....“Little girl, I’ve come to say / That this has been a lovely day / I love you, I love you …” sings a disarmingly sweet-sounding Lennon over an idling acoustic guitar, before a more typically Lennon-like pay-off. “…If you’d have asked me yesterday / Then I’d have told you sweet FA…”
“It shows you where Lennon was at the time,” Giles Martin tells MOJO. “It is a pop song – maybe a song you could imagine going on Double Fantasy later, when he’d gone full circle. But the ‘sweet FA’ thing is interesting. It’s like he’s thinking, ‘Aren’t we getting away from this kind of song?’”
Little Girl is not the only revelation of 2026’s Rubber Soul reboot, but it is the most extraordinary. Out of four CDs’ worth of remixes from by Giles Martin and associate Sam Okell, outtakes, a mono version, the US version of the album, plus the contemporaneous single Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out, Little Girl stands out – a Beatles-era John Lennon song no one outside of the band’s closest circle has ever heard.
“It was Allan Rouse who discovered the tape, I believe,” Beatle expert Kevin Howlett tells MOJO, referring to Giles Martin’s predecessor as Abbey Road’s keeper of The Beatles’ sonic flame, “but nobody knew about it outside of a few people at Abbey Road. It was a very closely guarded secret.”
The tape consisted of four fragments of Lennon’s attempts at the song – subsequently edited into one performance by Giles Martin – dated by Rouse to 1965. Howlett, who writes the new Rubber Soul package’s liner notes, cites more evidence for the dating: a lyric Lennon scrawled on a postcard that Hunter Davies included in his 2012 collection, The John Lennon Letters. Amid crossings out, one of the “little girl…” choruses is verbatim, although a verse suggests a more troubled song than we hear from the tape: “When a girl begins to be a problem / Pretty soon the girl must go / When they’re gone you find at last you love them…”
Like much of Rubber Soul, the song captures a feeling of The Beatles on the cusp - looking back, towards pop, and forward, to what pop could, and would, become in their hands.
More on Mojo's October issue, spotlighting Rubber Soul, here.
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