One of the Beatles’ biggest hits ever was their 1967 “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. The odd title instantly spawned conspiracy theories: it must have something to do with LSD — the psychedelic street drug — parents thought. The BBC even banned it from the air.
But no, said John Lennon, who wrote it: simply, his son Julian, then 4, came home from school with a drawing of Lucy O’Donnell (her name at the time), a nursery school chum, and told his father it was “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. Lennon loved the phrase, and penned the masterpiece about “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” from that inspiration. Julian lost track of Lucy, but later heard she was ill and got back in touch.
“I wasn’t sure at first how to approach her,” Julian Lennon said in June. “I wanted at least to get a note to her” after he heard of her illness. “I wanted to do something to put a smile on her face.” Vodden (her married name) enjoyed being linked with the Beatles, but “I don’t relate to the song, to that type of song,” she said. “As a teenager, I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends at school that I was the Lucy in the song and they said, ‘No, it’s not you; my parents said it’s about drugs.’ And I didn’t know what LSD was at the time, so I just kept it quiet, to myself.”
But in a 2004 interview with the BBC, Paul McCartney said the song was about LSD. Vodden died September 22 from complications of lupus. She was 47.