Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is a song written mostly by John Lennon (with some material by Paul McCartney) in 1967, and recorded by The Beatles for their album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Julian's drawing

According to the Beatles, one day in 1967, Lennon's son Julian came home from nursery school with a finger painting that he said was of his classmate, a four-year-old girl named Lucy O'Donnell. Showing the artwork to his father, young Julian described the picture as "Lucy - in the sky with diamonds".

Julian remembers: "I don't know why I called it 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 Lennon liked the phrase so much that he eventually wrote the song. In addition to the inspiration from his son's artwork, Lennon also drew heavily from a childhood inspiration of his own, Lewis Carroll - the "Wool and Water" chapter from Through the Looking-Glass was a particular inspiration. Lennon had always loved Carroll's work, which was obvious in his lyrics and his two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works .

Some have suggested the song refers to drug use, pointing out that the initials of the title are "LSD" and the lyrics are psychedelic. Lennon and the Beatles, who were often frank about their drug use, denied the song had anything to do with that. However, during a newspaper interview in 2004, McCartney was quoted as saying, "Day Tripper, that's one about acid. Lucy in the Sky, that's pretty obvious. ...There's others that make subtle hints about drugs, but, you know, it's easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles' music."

The song has since been covered by numerous other artists, as many of the Beatles songs were. One notable version was produced in 1968 by Canadian actor William Shatner and included on his album The Transformed Man. In many informal and more structured polls of music fans since, Shatner's rendition is considered to be one of the worst pop recordings of recent times (although the contorted market forces of commercial music can make such a distinction profitable). A more critically successful remake was recorded in 1974 by Elton John, with background vocals and guitar by John Lennon. (Lennon used the pseudonym 'Dr. Winston O'Boogie')

The song was also the inspiration for the naming of an important anthropological find. On November 30, 1974, Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discovered the skeleton of a 3.18 million year old female hominid in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia. They named it "Lucy" because the Beatles hit was playing on the radio at the time of the naming.

On 13 February, 2004 astronomers at Harvard announced the discovery of BPM 37093, a celestial object which appears to be a carbon star that is a huge diamond of 1x10^{34 carats - they humorously named it Lucy after Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (possibly also in reference to a similarly named giant diamond in Arthur C. Clarke's 2061: Odyssey Three, itself named after Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds).}

External links

• Song lyrics
• Lyrics and Chords