Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
BBC Local Radio: National distribution
October 2004
RADIO SCRIPT
PLAY: MUSIC TRACK
When I was a kid,
our music teacher taught us an American folk song
called ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’.
It was a kind of nonsense song
about a fool’s paradise
where there were rivers of lemonade,
trees that grew cigarettes,
and a lake of whisky you could paddle your canoe in.
When John Lennon wrote
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in 1967,
he was fuelled not by whisky but by LSD.
Which is why his Garden of Eden features
newspaper taxis,
plasticine porters,
and of course Lucy herself,
fabulously pictured as the girl with kaleidescope eyes.
Lucy in the Sky always reminds me of heaven.
According to the Good Book,
heaven's a land flowing with milk and honey,
it's a city made from pure gold,
with gates carved out of giant pearls.
It's every bit as surreal as Lucy in the Sky.
John used drugs to try to expand his mind.
But how about a mind-expanding faith?
A faith that sees through the world of here and now
and glimpses something golden?
John would hate the idea, I'm sure.
He famously said, ‘Imagine there's no heaven’.
But I think he was on to something with Lucy in the Sky. |
