Welcome to Music Friday when we bring you memorable throwback songs with jewelry, gemstones or precious metals in the lyrics or title. Today, we take a deep dive into the origins of one of the most famous — and controversial — "diamond" songs of all time.
It’s been 57 years since The Beatles released “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” a psychedelic singalong that stirred a media frenzy over what seemed to be a not-so-subtle reference to drugs. The first letter of each noun in the title did, in fact, spell “LSD,” a hallucinogenic drug that influenced pop culture in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Even though the LSD debate lingers today, the song’s co-writer John Lennon debunked the drug ties to Lucy and her diamonds during a 1971 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. The song, Lennon explained, was inspired by his toddler's drawing.
Lennon told the host, “My son came home with a drawing of a strange-looking woman flying around. He said, ‘It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds.’ I thought, ‘That’s beautiful.’ I immediately wrote the song about it.”
Lucy was a classmate of three-year-old Julian Lennon at the private Heath House School in the UK. Lucy O’Donnell (later Lucy Vodden) told the BBC in 2007 that she remembered “doing pictures on a double-sided easel, throwing paint at each other, much to the horror of the classroom attendant.”
Noted Julian, now 61, “I don’t know why I called it [Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds] 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.”
Co-writer Paul McCartney said the song’s fantastical imagery is a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
McCartney told an interviewer, “We did the whole thing like an Alice In Wonderland idea, being in a boat on the river… Every so often it broke off and you saw Lucy in the sky with diamonds all over the sky. This Lucy was God, the Big Figure, the White Rabbit.”
“Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds” was released as the third track from enormously successful Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, which spent 15 weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart and sold more than 32 million copies worldwide. Rolling Stone magazine had once ranked the album #1 on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” The magazine's 2024 updated ranking reduced it to a respectable #24.
The Beatles remain the best selling music act of all time with an estimated 600 million albums sold worldwide. McCartney, 82, and Ringo Starr, 84, are the two surviving members of the band. Lennon was assassinated in 1980 at the age of 40. George Harrison lost his battle with lung cancer in 2001 at the age of 58.
Trivia: In 2004, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics named a white dwarf star “Lucy” as a nod to The Beatles’ song because they believe the super-dense star — scientifically known as BPM 37093 — is made primarily of diamond.
Please check out the audio track of The Beatles performing “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” The lyrics are below if you’d like to sing along…
“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”
Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Performed by The Beatles.
Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she’s gone
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Ah
Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
That grow so incredibly high
Newspaper taxis appear on the shore
Waiting to take you away
Climb in the back with your head in the clouds
And you’re gone
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Ah
Picture yourself on a train in a station
With plasticine porters with looking glass ties
Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile
The girl with the kaleidoscope eyes
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Ah
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Ah
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Credit: Photo by ingen uppgift, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
