Paul McCartney on "Lucy in the Sky with 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.

"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.

"It's like modern poetry, but neither John nor I have read much. The last time I approached it I was thinking, 'This is strange and far out,' and I did not dig it all that much, except Dylan Thomas, who I suddenly started getting, and I was quite pleased with myself because I got it, but I hadn't realised he was going to be saying exactly the same things."