The Julian Lennon artwork that sparked ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’
If you were the second coming of Pablo Picasso as a child, it might be worth digging out that old artwork from the loft—it could just inspire a hit record. Sounds unlikely, granted, but that’s exactly what happened to Julian Lennon. A childhood drawing of his ended up helping his father, John, create one of The Beatles’ most mysteriously psychedelic hits: ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.
The 1967 tune is perhaps the song with the most debated meaning ever in the music canon, beaming as the beacon of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but it all sparked from a much more innocent and homely place. The young Lennon son had been flexing his artistic muscles and brought a drawing he had titled ‘Lucy – in the sky with diamonds’ home from nursery to show his father, sending the songwriter extraordinaire’s head into a dizzying spin.
It was good to see that the Lennons were a creative family because—no offence to Julian—looking at it just seems like your everyday kids’ scribble. But it clearly ignited a fire under his Fab Four father, who used the name as the basis for a sonic swirling kaleidoscopic vision of orange trees and marmalade skies.
You may be rolling your eyes right now – of course, this is just the story they parroted to the world as a way of covering up its real meaning and to avoid it being banned. Everyone who is anyone has pointed out that the initials of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ line up suspiciously well with the acronym for a certain hallucinogenic substance, which, if there was anything the Fab Four were known for dabbling in more than music, it was that.
In 1971, four years after the song was released and more than enough time for the rumour mill to go into overdrive, Lennon tried to protest: “Nobody believes me. This is the truth. My son came home and showed me this drawing of a strange-looking woman flying around, and I said, ‘What is it?’ And he said it was Lucy in the sky with diamonds. I said, ‘Oh, that’s beautiful,’ and I immediately wrote a song about it.”
Try as he might to clear his name, there was no way Lennon’s suggestions of innocence were cutting it, especially when one of his own bandmates later threw him under the bus. Paul McCartney went some way in exposing the truth in 1998 when he said: “When we were talking about ‘cellophane flowers’ and ‘kaleidoscope eyes’ and ‘grow so incredibly high,’ we were talking about drug experiences, no doubt about it.”
This was no revelation, really – the era in which the song was written was a time of permanent trip, and to say The Beatles sat on the fringes, well, it’s a complete distortion of the reality.
To give both sides of the debate their dues, the origins of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ most probably did begin somewhere with Julian’s childish scrawl, but the entity it then grew to take on was so much more psychedelic and other-worldly than the young boy could ever have imagined. The land of marshmallow pies and plasticine porters most likely never existed in Julian’s psyche, but he does take the credit for creating a whole new reinvention of acid rock.
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