Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

People later thought ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was LSD. I swear we didn’t notice that when it came out, in actual fact, if you want to be pedantic you’d have to say it is LITSWD, but of course LSD is a better story.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

From Wikipedia:

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written primarily by John Lennon with assistance from Paul McCartney, and credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. Lennon’s son Julian inspired the song with a nursery school drawing that he called “Lucy – in the sky with diamonds”. Shortly before the album’s release, speculation arose that the first letter of each of the nouns in the title intentionally spelled “LSD”, the initialism commonly used for the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide. Lennon repeatedly denied that he had intended it as a drug song, and attributed the song’s fantastical imagery to his reading of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books.

The Beatles recorded “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” in March 1967. Adding to the song’s ethereal qualities, the musical arrangement includes a Lowrey organ part heavily treated with studio effects, and a drone provided by an Indian tambura. The song has been recognised as a key work in the psychedelic genre. Among its many cover versions, a 1974 recording by Elton John – with a guest appearance by Lennon – was a number 1 hit in the US and Canada.

Background and inspiration

John Lennon said that his inspiration for the song came when his three-year-old son Julian showed him a nursery school drawing that he called “Lucy – in the Sky with Diamonds”, depicting his classmate Lucy O’Donnell. Julian later recalled: “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.” Ringo Starr witnessed the moment and said that Julian first uttered the song’s title on returning home from nursery school. Lennon later said, “I thought that’s beautiful. I immediately wrote a song about it.”

According to Lennon, the lyrics were largely derived from the literary style of Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice in Wonderland. Lennon had read and admired Carroll’s works, and the title of Julian’s drawing reminded him of the “Which Dreamed It?” chapter of Through the Looking Glass, in which Alice floats in a “boat beneath a sunny sky”. Lennon recalled in a 1980 interview:

It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that.

Paul McCartney remembered of the song’s composition, “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.” He later recalled helping Lennon finish the song at Lennon’s Kenwood home, specifically claiming he contributed the “newspaper taxis” and “cellophane flowers” lyrics. Lennon’s 1968 interview with Rolling Stone magazine confirmed McCartney’s contribution.

Lucy O’Donnell Vodden, who lived in Surbiton, Surrey, died 28 September 2009 of complications of lupus at the age of 46. Julian had been informed of her illness and renewed their friendship before her death.

Composition

Most of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is in simple triple metre (3/4 time), but the chorus is in 4/4 time. In the song, the structure modulates between musical keys, using the key of A major for verses, B-flat major for the pre-chorus, and G major for the chorus. It is sung by Lennon over an increasingly complicated underlying arrangement which features a tambura, played by George Harrison; lead electric guitar put through a Leslie speaker, played by Harrison; and a counter melody on Lowrey organ played by McCartney and taped with a special organ stop sounding “not unlike a celeste”. Session tapes from the initial 1 March 1967 recording of this song reveal Lennon originally sang the line “Cellophane flowers of yellow and green” as a broken phrase, but McCartney suggested that he sing it more fluidly to improve the song.

Recording

The recording of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” began with rehearsals in Studio 2 at Abbey Road on 28 February 1967. The instrumental backing was finished the following evening. On the first take, track one of the four-track tape contained acoustic guitar and piano, track two McCartney’s Lowrey organ, track three Ringo Starr’s drums, and track four a guide vocal by Lennon during the verses. Take eight replaced the guide vocal with Harrison’s tambura. The four tracks of this take were then mixed together and recorded on the first track of a second four-track tape. On 2 March, Lennon’s double-tracked vocals, accompanied by McCartney on the choruses, were recorded to tracks two and three. McCartney’s bass and Harrison’s lead guitar occupied track four. The lead guitar part varies between sections of the song: over the bridges, Harrison duplicates Lennon’s melody and intonation in the style of a sarangi accompanying an Indian khyal vocalist; over the choruses, he plays an ascending riff on his Fender Stratocaster (mirrored by McCartney’s bass), with heavy Leslie treatment given to the part. Eleven mono mixes of the song were made at the 2 March session, but they were rejected in favour of the final mono mix created on 3 March. A stereo mix was made on 7 April.

Outtakes from the recording sessions have been officially released. The Beatles’ Anthology 2, released in 1996, contained a composite remix, with ingredients from takes six, seven and eight, while the first take of the song was featured on the two-disc and six-disc versions of the 50th-anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper in 2017. The six-disc collection also included take five and the last of the eleven mono mixes made on 2 March 1967.

LSD rumours

Rumours of the connection between the title of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and the initialism “LSD” began circulating shortly after the release of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP in June 1967. McCartney gave two interviews in June admitting to having taken the drug. Lennon later said he was surprised at the idea the title was a hidden reference to LSD, countering that the song “wasn’t about that at all,” and it “was purely unconscious that it came out to be LSD. Until someone pointed it out, I never even thought of it. I mean, who would ever bother to look at initials of a title? … It’s not an acid song.”

McCartney confirmed Lennon’s claim on several occasions. In 1968 he said:

When you write a song and you mean it one way, and someone comes up and says something about it that you didn’t think of – you can’t deny it. Like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” people came up and said, cunningly, “Right, I get it. L-S-D,” and it was when [news]papers were talking about LSD, but we never thought about it.

In a 2004 interview with Uncut magazine, McCartney confirmed it was “pretty obvious” drugs did influence some of the group’s compositions at that time, including “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, though he tempered this statement by adding, “[I]t’s easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles’ music.”

Claims have circulated that the BBC banned the song at the time of its release in 1967 for its alleged references to drugs. Among other sources, the claim has been recited in The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature. This claim has been disputed by authors Alan Clayson and Spencer Leigh, who wrote in The Walrus Was Ringo: 101 Beatles Myths Debunked that the BBC never officially banned the song, despite the corporation’s doubts about the subject matter. The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship consulted with the BBC’s surviving internal correspondence and memos from 1967, and mentioned no ban on any Sgt. Pepper song aside from the one on “A Day in the Life”, stating the BBC banned “this one track [A Day in the Life] from the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band“. A 2014 documentary film produced and broadcast by BBC television entitled Britain’s Most Dangerous Songs: Listen to the Banned also claimed that the BBC never banned the song:

Strangely, on an entire album influenced by the band’s mind-expanding experimentation, it was just the final track, “A Day in the Life”, that came under the BBC’s moral microscope … After lengthy correspondence with Joseph Lockwood at EMI, the BBC banned the song for what they believed to be a drug reference in just one line … In fact, another song on Sgt. Pepper [i.e, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”] did slip under the BBC’s radar.

The song was played at least once on BBC Radio at the time of the Sgt. Pepper album’s release, on the 20 May 1967 broadcast of Where It’s At hosted by Kenny Everett and Chris Denning. The song was also played as part of the 1972 BBC Radio documentary The Beatles Story, hosted by Brian Matthew.

Reception

Upon the release of the Sgt. Pepper album, Disc and Music Echo magazine wrote that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was “easily remembered”, that the song spotlighted John Lennon’s “peculiarly insinuating” vocals, and that it “jumps along on a crashing clavicord-type sound.” Richard Goldstein wrote in a review for The New York Times that the song was “an engaging curio, nothing more.” Ernie Santosuosso wrote in a review for The Boston Globe that the song’s imagery was “wild”.

Discussing the impact of the Sgt. Pepper album, author Nicholas Schaffner cited the song as an example of how the Beatles successfully captured the way “young people were trying to transcend, transform, or escape from straight society” in 1967. He said that just as Harrison’s “Within You Without You” represented the exoticism of Herman Hesse’s Siddartha, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was a “miniature pop version” of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in terms of conveying the sense of wonder the book evoked. According to musicologist Walter Everett, the song’s lyrics inspired “derivative texts” throughout the late 1960s, namely John Fred & His Playboy Band’s “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)”, the Lemon Pipers’ “Jelly Jungle (of Orange Marmalade)”, Pink Floyd’s “Let There Be More Light”, and the Scaffold’s “Jelly Covered Cloud”.

Rolling Stone magazine described “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as “Lennon’s lavish daydream.”[citation needed] In their respective reviews for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine identifies it as “one of the touchstones of British psychedelia,” while Richie Unterberger views it as “one of the best songs on the Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper album, and one of the classic songs of psychedelia as a whole.” Unterberger adds: “There are few other songs that so successfully evoke a dream world, in both the sonic textures and words.” In his book on the history of ambient music, Mark Prendergast highlights the track as one of the album’s “three outstanding cuts”, along with “A Day in the Life” and “Within You Without You”. He describes it as “incredible” and “a gossamer-like evocation of childlike psychedelia.” For BBC Culture, Greg Kot called the song an “acid-rock fantasia” and a high point of the album.

In a review for the BBC Music website, Chris Jones described the track as “nursery rhyme surrealism” that contributed to Sgt. Pepper‘s “revolutionary … sonic carpet that enveloped the ears and sent the listener spinning into other realms.” Writing for Paste in 2015, Hilary Saunders called the song “a perfectly indulgent introduction to psych-rock.” In 2013, Dave Swanson of Ultimate Classic Rock ranked “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” fourth on his list of the “Top 10 Beatles Psychedelic Songs” saying that, despite Lennon’s insistence about the inspiration for its title, the track is “Three-and-a-half minutes of pure lysergic bliss, full of picturesque and surreal lyrics set to one of the Beatles’ most trippy songs.”

Harrison later identified “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as one of the few songs he liked from Sgt. Pepper and expressed satisfaction with his Indian music-inspired contributions. For his part, Lennon expressed disappointment with the Beatles’ arrangement of the recording, complaining that inadequate time was taken to fully develop his initial idea for the song. He also said he had not sung it very well. “I was so nervous I couldn’t sing,” he told journalist Ray Connolly, “but I like the lyrics.” According to author Ian MacDonald, in a scenario similar to Lennon’s disappointment with “Strawberry Fields Forever“, Lennon most likely rued the loss of “sentimental gentleness” he had envisaged for the piece, and, overly passive to his songwriting partner’s suggestions, allowed the arrangement to become dominated by McCartney’s “glittering countermelody”. MacDonald views the bridge portions as the “most effective” sections, through their subtle use of harmonised drone and “featherweight bass”, and bemoans the reversion to “clodhopping … three-chord 4/4 rock” over the choruses. He concludes by saying that the track “succeed[s] more as a glamorous production (voice and guitar through the Leslie cabinet; echo and varispeed on everything) than as an integrated song.”

Legacy

Lennon mentioned “Lucy in the Sky” in the Beatles’ song “I Am the Walrus“.

A 3.2-million-year-old, 40% complete fossil skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis specimen, discovered in 1974 by Donald Johanson, Yves Coppens, Maurice Taieb and Tom Gray, was named “Lucy” because the Beatles song was being played loudly and repeatedly on a tape recorder in the camp. The phrase “Lucy in the sky” became “Lucy in disguise” to the anthropologists, because they initially did not understand the impact of their discovery. The NASA mission Lucy has, in turn, been named after the fossil. It is due to arrive at its first target, asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, in April 2025. […]

I went out to Weybridge one afternoon as usual to John’s house and the first thing he showed me on arrival was a picture that his son Julian had drawn at school. This consisted of a young girl floating in the air with a couple of childishly drawn stars beside her. Across the top of the paper in very neat schoolboy writing in pencil were the words ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. John explained that Julian had a friend at school called Lucy, and this was her portrait. He said to me that he thought this would be a great title for a song and I agreed. We then went up to the music room at the top of the house and he played me the idea he had for it, starting with ‘Picture yourself…’ We discussed Lewis Carroll and the Alice books and how this title would make a great psychedelic song. We began to trade images with each other. I suggested ‘cellophane flowers’ — cellophane having been a favourite word of mine since childhood — and then shortly after that I came up with ‘newspaper taxis’. John liked both and countered with ‘the girl with kaleidoscope eyes’. As everyone knows, the song was generally believed to be a deliberate use of the initials LSD in the title, but this was only something we discovered later, and certainly was not intended. Nevertheless, the lyrics were intentionally psychedelic.

Paul McCartney – From “With A Little Help From My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper“, 1995

John had the title and he had the first verse. It started off very Alice in Wonderland: ‘Picture yourself in a boat, on the river … Its very Alice. Both of us had read the Alice books and always referred to them, we were always talking about ‘Jabberwocky’ and we knew those more than any other books really. And when psychedelics came in, the heady quality of them was perfect. So we just went along with it. I sat there and wrote it with him: I offered ‘cellophane flowers’ and ‘newspaper taxis’ and John replied with ‘kaleidoscope eyes’. I remember which was which because we traded words off each other, as we always did … And in our mind it was an Alice thing, which both of us loved.

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ and all the madness that went on around it was absolutely bonkers. I was actually with John when Julian came in with this little kid’s painting, a crazy little painting, and John (as the dad) said, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and Julian said, ‘It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds.’ And then John got busy.

Ringo Starr – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

I saw Mel Torme introducing a Lennon-McCartney show, saying how ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was about LSD. It never was, and nobody believes me. I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelt LSD. This is the truth: my son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around. I said, ‘What is it?’ and he said, ‘It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds,’ and I thought, That’s beautiful.’ I immediately wrote a song about it. And the song had gone out, the whole album had been published, and somebody noticed that the letters spelt out LSD. I had no idea, and of course after that I was checking all the songs to see what the letters spelt out. They didn’t spell out anything, none of the others. It wasn’t about that at all.

The images were from Alice in Wonderland. It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep, and the next minute they’re rowing in a rowing boat somewhere – and I was visualising that. There was also the image of the female who would someday come save me – ‘a girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ who would come out of the sky. It’s not an acid song.

John Lennon – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

One of the most obviously ambiguous of your songs, the one that everybody can see something in, is ‘Lucy in the Sky Diamonds’.

This one is amazing. As I was saying before, when you write a song and you mean it one way, and then someone comes up and says something about it that you didn’t think of — you can’t deny it. Like ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, people came up and said, very cunningly, ‘Right, I get it. L — S — D’ and it was when all the papers were talking about LSD, but we never thought about it.

If you take LSD as a sort of pun, the whole song is a trip.

What happened was that John’s son Julian did a drawing at school and brought it home, and he has a schoolmate called Lucy, and John said what’s that, and he said ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ — so we had a nice title. We did the whole thing like an Alice in Wonderland idea, being in a boat on the river, slowly drifting downstream and those great Cellophane flowers towering over your head. 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. You can just write a song with imagination on words and that’s what we did.

Paul McCartney – Interview with The Observer, November 1967

From The Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations:

[a] mono 3 Mar 1967.
UK: Parlophone PMC 7026 Sgt Pepper 1967.
US: Capitol MAS 2653 Sgt Pepper 1967.

[b] stereo 7 Apr 1967.
UK: Parlophone PCS 7026 Sgt Pepper 1967, Apple PCSP 718 The Beatles 1967-1970 1973.
US: Capitol SMAS 2653 Sgt Pepper 1967, Apple SKBO-3404 The Beatles 1967-1970 1973.
CD: EMI CDP 7 46442 2 Sgt Pepper 1987, EMI CDP 7 97039 2 The Beatles 1967-1970 1993.

[c] stereo 1995. edited.
CD: Apple CDP 8 34448 2 Anthology 2 1996.

Mono [a] has quite a bit of “phasing” not in [b]– phasing is ADT with deliberate tape speed manipulation (“flanging”) for a classic pyschedelic effect. Note especially the third “Lucy” line in the first refrain, but it continues, notable again in second refrain and in instrumental part leading to third refrain. Stereo [b] sounds more natural but [a] is evidently what was desired.

A new mono mix was made 1 November 1967 for the original Yellow Submarine film print with no vocal in the first part of the first verse, so an actor for the film could be dubbed in, and this also has less phasing.

The Anthology mix [c] is deliberately different and sychronizes parts of an outtake with the standard take. It is take 6 (standard version is 7) with a tamboura from take 7 with harmony vocals in the chorus from the standard version take 8. There is no bass.

Lyrics

Variations

• A Mono version • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Mono)"
• A2009 2009 mono remaster • From "The Beatles in Mono (2009)"
• A2014 2014 remaster • From "The Beatles In Mono (Vinyl boxset - 2014)"
• B Stereo version • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Stereo)"
• B2009 2009 stereo remaster • From "The Beatles • The Original Studio Recordings (2009)"
• C Composite of Takes 6, 7 and 8 • From "Anthology 2"
• C2016 Composite of Takes 6, 7 and 8. 2016 remaster • From "Anthology 2 (2016 remaster)"
• D 1999 remix • From "Yellow Submarine Songtrack"
• E 2006 "The Beatles Love" mix • From "Love"
• F 2017 stereo mix • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (50th anniversary boxset)"
• G Take 1 and speech at the end • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (50th anniversary boxset)"
• H Speech, Take 4 (false start) and Take 5 • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (50th anniversary boxset)"
• I Original mono mix - RM11 • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (50th anniversary boxset)"
• J 2017 Dolby Atmos mix • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Dolby Atmos - 2017)"
• K 2022 Dolby Atmos mix • From "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Dolby Atmos - 2022)"

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