Beatles producer opens up on lost John Lennon song from new Rubber Soul

7 August 2026, 13:28 | Updated: 7 August 2026, 13:49

Everything you need to know about "lost" Beatles song 'Little Girl'.

The upcoming release of a deluxe edition of The Beatles sixth studio album Rubber Soul had long been rumoured.

And while the inclusion of a Giles Martin remix and batch of studio outtakes was very much expected, there was a real surprise when the album was finally announced.

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Included on the tracklisting was not just unheard demos of contemporaneous non-album singles 'Day Tripper' and 'We Can Work It Out', but also a song called 'Little Girl'.

The press release described the track as "a previously unheard John Lennon song outline never before released or even rumoured" and now Giles Martin has spilled the beans on the mysterious track ahead of its release on October 2.

"It shows you where Lennon was at the time,” Giles Martin told Mojo.

The Beatles - Rubber Soul (Special Editions)

"It is a pop song – maybe a song you could imagine going on Double Fantasy later, when he’d gone full circle."

Mojo also reveals some of the lyrics of the sketch: "Little girl, I’ve come to say / That this has been a lovely day / I love you, I love you ... if you’d have asked me yesterday / Then I’d have told you sweet FA."

Martin has pieced together a single performance from four fragments of Lennon's attempts at recording a demo for the song.

And while the verses are completely different, the lyrics of the chorus feature in a postcard John Lennon wrote to friend and biographer Hunter Davies from 1965, which Davies released in 2012 in Lennon Letters.

Martin said of the lyrics in the recording: "The 'sweet FA' thing is interesting. It’s like he's thinking, 'Aren't we getting away from this kind of song?'"

And Beatles expert Kevin Howlett told Mojo: "It was Allan Rouse [the Abbey Road employee known as The Beatles 'gatekeeper' who died in 2016] who discovered the tape, I believe, but nobody knew about it outside of a few people at Abbey Road. It was a very closely guarded secret.”