Who Was “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” Written About?
beatlesmaniac11/FlickrThe Beatles in costume from the Sgt. Pepper era.
In addition to “Hey Jude,” John Lennon’s son Julian inspired another Beatles’ classic — at least, its name.
As Lennon later recalled, it was four-year-old Julian’s drawing of a girl named Lucy — and not LSD — that prompted Lennon to pen “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
“This is the truth,” Lennon said. “My son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around. I said, ‘What is it?’ and he said, ‘It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds,’ and I thought, ‘That’s beautiful.’ I immediately wrote a song about it.”
As for the images, Lennon recounted that they came from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
“The images were from Alice In Wonderland. It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep, and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that,” Lennon said.
“It was purely unconscious that it came out to be LSD. Until somebody pointed it out, I never even thought of it.”
Paul McCartney also helped write the song. He confirmed as well that it was not about LSD.
“I showed up at John’s house and he had a drawing Julian had done at school with the title ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ above it. Then we went up to his music room and wrote the song, swapping psychedelic suggestions as we went,” McCartney explained.
“I remember coming up with ‘cellophane flowers’ and ‘newspaper taxis’ and John answered with things like ‘kaleidoscope eyes’ and ‘looking glass ties.’ We never noticed the LSD initial until it was pointed out later — by which point people didn’t believe us.”
In spite of the song’s popularity, Lennon was dissatisfied with it. “I heard ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ last night. It’s abysmal, you know?” he later complained. “The track is just terrible. I mean, it is a great track, a great song, but it isn’t a great track because it wasn’t made right.”
Lucy Vodden, the girl who attended nursery school with Julian and inspired his drawing, passed away in 2009 at the age of 46. She had some issues with the song written in her name.
“I don’t relate to the song, to that type of song,” she told the Associated Press. “As a teenager, I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends at school that I was the Lucy in the song and they said, ‘No, it’s not you, my parents said it’s about drugs.’
“And I didn’t know what LSD was at the time, so I just kept it quiet, to myself.”
