In February 1967, John Lennon’s four-year-old son Julian came home from nursery school with a painting that he’d done of his classmate, Lucy O’Donnell. When John asked his son about the picture, which showed a girl floating among the stars, Julian replied, “It’s Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds.”
“I don’t know why I called it that or why it stood out from all my other drawings,” Julian Lennon has said. “I used to show Dad everything I’d built or painted at school, and this one sparked off the idea for a song.”
John Lennon loved wordplay and surrealism, and his son’s evocative phrase gave him a direction for the lyric. As John recalled in The Beatles Anthology: “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’re rowing in a rowing boat somewhere—and I was visualizing that. There was also the image of the female who would someday come save me—‘a girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ who came out of the sky.”
Another influence on the song was The Goon Show, a 1950s British radio comedy featuring Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers. In fact, the antics of the early Beatles owe a lot to the Goons. Lennon once told Milligan that “Lucy” was inspired by his love of Goon Show dialogue. Indeed, the Goons had a bit about “plasticine ties” which could easily have been the source for the line “plasticine porters with looking glass ties.”
“We went up to his music room and wrote the song, swapping psychedelic suggestions as we went,” Paul McCartney recalls. “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.”
The Beatles’ history is full of strange coincidences, though none stranger than the song’s initials corresponding to the Summer of Love’s drug of choice. John Lennon would spend the rest of his life denying any deliberate connection.
“I saw Mel Tormé introducing a Lennon-McCartney show, saying how ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ was about LSD,” he said in Anthology. “It never was, and nobody believes me. I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelled LSD. Of course, after that, I was checking all the songs to see what the letters spelled out.”
By Bill DeMain
Photo by Val Wilmer/Redferns
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