Lucy Vodden, Who Inspired a Beatles Song, Dies at 46

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS - SEPT. 29, 2009

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LONDON (AP) — Lucy Vodden, who provided the inspiration for the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” has died in London. She was 46.

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Her death, after a history of lupus, was announced Monday by St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, where she had been treated for more than five years, and by her husband, Ross Vodden.

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Ms. Vodden’s connection to the Beatles dates back to when she was Lucy O’Donnell, a schoolmate and friend of Julian Lennon, John Lennon’s son. Julian, then 4, came home from school with a drawing one day, showed it to his father, and said it was “Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”

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At the time John Lennon was gathering material for his contributions to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the landmark album released in 1967. He seized on the image and developed it into what is widely regarded as a psychedelic masterpiece, with haunting images of “newspaper taxis” and a “girl with kaleidoscope eyes.”

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Rock music critics credited the song’s title to a veiled reference to LSD, but John Lennon always said the phrase came from his son.

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Ms. Vodden lost touch with Julian Lennon after he left the school following his parents’ divorce, but they were reunited in recent years. After hearing about her disease, Julian Lennon, who lives in France, sent her flowers and vouchers for use at a gardening center near her home in Surrey in southeast England, and frequently sent her text messages in an effort to buttress her spirits.

Ms. Vodden said she enjoyed her link to the Beatles but was not particularly fond of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”

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“I don’t relate to the song, to that type of song,” she told The Associated Press in June. “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.”