The Beatles To Reveal John Lennon’s Previously Unknown Little Girl Demo

John Lennon’s previously unknown 1965 home demo “Little Girl” will be released for the first time on October 2 as part of the expanded Rubber Soul Special Edition box set.

by Paul Cashmere

The Beatles’ Rubber Soul archive has yielded an unexpected discovery more than 60 years after the album was recorded: “Little Girl”, an unfinished John Lennon acoustic guitar demo that was apparently unknown outside a tightly controlled circle at Abbey Road. The recording will be issued officially for the first time on October 2, 2026, on the expanded Rubber Soul box set.

The significance of “Little Girl” is its provenance. Unlike many Beatles recordings that have emerged through bootlegs, collector tapes, studio leaks or previous archival releases, this recording was not known to circulate publicly. There had been no established collector trail or widespread rumours pointing to its existence.

The recording dates from around the summer of 1965, during the period when The Beatles were developing the material that became Rubber Soul. Lennon performs alone with an acoustic guitar, working through an unfinished song rather than presenting a completed Beatles composition.

The surviving material has been assembled by producer Giles Martin from fragments of the original tape. The resulting recording runs for 2 minutes and 17 seconds and presents Lennon experimenting with melody, lyrics and vocal phrasing.

The performance provides an unusually direct glimpse into Lennon’s songwriting process at a pivotal point in The Beatles’ development. The lyrics remain incomplete and include placeholder passages, while the basic structure suggests Lennon was still determining what the song would become.

Danny Eccleston at Mojo reported last month that one of the most revealing moments comes in the lyric “sweet FA”, a typically Lennon-like turn that undercuts the tenderness of the song’s opening. Giles Martin has described the recording as a pop song that, in another period of Lennon’s career, might have found a place on Double Fantasy.

“Little Girl” also contains a lyrical connection to Paul McCartney’s “I’ve Just Seen A Face”, a song that appeared on the American version of Rubber Soul. John seems to play with Paul’s “had it been another day” lyrics with his possible “if you’d asked me yesterday” retort, which brings the timeline of the two songs ever closer. Even though the recording itself remained a solo Lennon project, that summer of ’65 period was when both Paul’s ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ and John’s ‘It’s Only Love’ were being recorded for the ‘Help’ album before ‘Rubber Soul’ rehearsals even began with ‘Little Girl’ being a missing link between the two.

That in itself makes ‘Little Girl’ more suited for a ‘Help’ box, if ever there was one, instead of ‘Rubber Soul’.

Remember, America had Frankenstein-like editions of Beatles albums that made no sense to the original versions in the rest of the world. ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’, which Americans were served as a ‘Rubber Soul’ song, was a ‘Help’ song to the rest of the world, making this remote connection possible. The ‘Help’ album (non-US edition to the rest of the world) was released in August 1965, making the timing possible.

Side One and Side Two os the US version of ‘Rubber Soul’ opened with two ‘Help’ tracks ”Ive Just Seen A Face’ and ‘It’s Only Love’. The American version dropped a key songs ‘Nowhere Man’ and ‘Drive My Car’ which both didn’t appear until the US only album ‘Yesterday and Today’ in the middle of 1966.

The tape’s history adds another layer to the discovery. Beatles historian Kevin Howlett has identified Allan Rouse, the former Abbey Road archivist responsible for The Beatles’ recordings, as the person who discovered the tape. According to Howlett, knowledge of the recording remained confined to a small number of people at Abbey Road.

The surviving tape reportedly contained four fragments of Lennon working on “Little Girl”. Giles Martin subsequently edited those sections into a single performance for the new release. The dating to 1965 is supported by the tape itself and by Lennon’s handwritten lyrics reproduced in The John Lennon Letters, published by Hunter Davies in 2012.

The handwritten material indicates that Lennon was considering a darker lyrical direction than the surviving recording ultimately suggests. One discarded passage concerns a relationship becoming problematic before concluding that, after the woman has gone, the songwriter realises he loves her.

That evidence places “Little Girl” among the unfinished ideas Lennon was developing as The Beatles moved away from the straightforward pop framework of their earlier work. Rubber Soul, recorded in 1965 and released in December that year, marked a significant transition in the group’s songwriting, arrangements and studio ambitions.

The expanded edition also puts the Lennon demo into a broader archival framework. The four-disc collection includes the original UK album, a mono presentation, the original US configuration and a substantial selection of session recordings, alternate takes and period material.

Several of the sessions have historical precedents in earlier Beatles archival releases. Anthology 2 previously included early recordings of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and “I’m Looking Through You”, while other Rubber Soul material has subsequently appeared through expanded catalogue projects.

“Little Girl”, however, occupies a different category because it was apparently never part of the public Beatles tape-trading ecosystem. Its appearance therefore expands the known Lennon songwriting archive rather than simply providing another variation of a familiar Beatles performance.

The discovery also illustrates the continuing depth of The Beatles’ recorded catalogue. More than six decades after the group’s most prolific creative period, material can still emerge from the archives that has not previously been documented by collectors or included in earlier official projects.

The new edition of Rubber Soul will also include newly prepared mixes and archival material overseen by Giles Martin, continuing the catalogue restoration programme that has revisited several major Beatles albums using modern audio separation and remixing techniques.

For “Little Girl”, the October 2 release will finally establish an official place for an otherwise forgotten Lennon composition. The recording remains a fragment of an unfinished song, but its survival offers a rare document of Lennon working alone during one of the most important periods in The Beatles’ songwriting history.

For a further deep dive into Little Girl check out Beatley Tones Beatles Channel: