Recommendations of the Editorial team
In 1970 John Lennon said to the Rolling Stone: “I swear to God, I swear to Mao or whoever: I was not aware that the song title, LSD ‘could be spelled.”
Rather, the inspiration was a picture that his four -year -old son Julian von Lucy O’Donnell had painted, who was sitting next to him in the preschool. “He had painted a few stars in the background and called the whole thing” Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. It’s that simple, that’s the story. “
Psychedelic rhymes
The song lives with Lennon’s faithle for Lewis Carroll-like children’s rhymes. Lennon delivered the “Kaleidoscope Eyes”, McCartney thought “Cellophane Flowers” and “New Paper Taxis” – and they had a psychedelic rhyme in no time. “The pictures came from Alice in Wonderland,” admitted Lennon in 1980. “Alice is in the boat. Then she buys an egg that is suddenly a Humpty Dumpty. The woman in the shop turns into a sheep, and the next moment they row on the boat.”
In his villa in Weybridge, where he wrote the song, Lennon spent most of the time, lulled by drugs, television and the dull feeling that his marriage could no longer be saved. And yet “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was also a sign of hope for him in this situation. “It was the picture of a female person who would save me at some point. And the person was Yoko – although I didn’t even know them at the time.”
Lucy O’Donnell died in September 2009, just 46 years old. Julian Lennon bowed to his former classmate by publishing a benefit single called “Lucy” shortly afterwards. When she heard “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” for the first time as a teenager, she told her friends that she was the said Lucy. She was not believed and taught her that the song from LSD was acting. Lucy didn’t want to argue “because I was embarrassed not to know what LSD was”.