One afternoon early in 1967, Julian
Lennon came home from his nursery school with a painting
that he said was of his classmate, four-year-old Lucy
O'Donnell. Explaining his artwork to his father, Julian
described it as Lucy - 'in the sky with
diamonds'.
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This phrase stuck in John's mind
and triggered off the stream of associations that led to the
writing of the dream-like 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds',
one of three tracks on the Sgt. Pepper album which received
special media attention because it was thought to be 'about
drugs'. Although it's unlikely that John would have written
such a piece of reverie without ever having experimented
with hallucinogenics, this song was equally affected by his
love of surrealism, word play and the works of Lewis
Carroll.
The suggestion that the song was a
description of an LSD trip appeared to be substantiated when
it was noted that the title spelt LSD. Yet John consistently
denied this, going into great detail in interviews about the
drugs he had taken. He insisted that the title was taken
from what Julian had said about his painting. Julian himself
recalls, "I don't know why I called it
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that or why it stood out from all
my other drawings but I obviously had an affection for Lucy
at that age. I used to show dad everything I'd built or
painted at school and this one sparked off the idea for a
song about Lucy in the sky with diamonds."
John claimed that the hallucinatory
images in the song were inspired by the 'Wool and Water'
chapter in Lewis Carroll Through The Looking Glass, where
Alice is taken down a river in a rowing boat by the Queen,
who has suddenly changed into a sheep.
As a child, Alice's Adventures In
Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass were two of John's
favorite books. He said that it was partly through reading
them that he realized the images in his own mind weren't
indications of insanity. "Surrealism to me is reality," he
said. "Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always
was."
For similar reasons, John was
attracted to The Goon Show, the British radio comedy
programme featuring Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter
Sellers which was broadcast by the BBC between June 1952 and
January 1960. The Goon Show scripts, principally written by
Milligan, lampooned establishment figures, attacked post-war
stuffiness and popularized a surreal form of humor. The
celebrated Beatle 'wackiness' owed a lot to the Goons, as
did John's poetry and writing. He told Spike Milligan that
'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' and several other songs had
been partly inspired by his love of Goon Show dialogue. "We
used to talk about 'plasticine ties' in The Goon Show and
this crept up in Lucy as 'plasticine porters with looking
glass ties'," says Milligan who, as a friend of George
Martin, sat in on some of the Sgt. Peppers sessions. "I knew
Lennon quite well," he said. "He used to talk a lot about
comedy. He was a Goon Show freak. It all stopped when he
married Yoko Ono. Everything stopped. He never asked for me
again."
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