It was 40 years ago today that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play and, although she did not perform on the album, a Surbiton housewife confirms today that she was the inspiration for one of its most famous songs.

Myth and rumour have surrounded the real-life inspiration for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, John Lennon’s swirling ode to psychedelia.

It was first thought that the singer’s muse was Lucy Richardson, a Suffolk schoogirl who went on to become a film art director.

Then speculation centred on the daughter of the comedian Peter Cook. And many believe that the song is a disguised paean to the joys of LSD. But Beatles biographers and accounts by the band members confirm that Lucy O’Donnell is the only possible source for the song.

Lucy, now a 43-year-old housewife from Surrey, was a classmate of John’s son, Julian, at Heath House nursery school in Weybridge. Her moment of fame came in 1967, when Julian came home from school with a drawing of a girl surrounded by stars. John asked him what it was. “It’s Lucy, in the sky with diamonds,” Julian said.

Mrs Vodden, as she is now known, said: “I remember Julian and I both doing pictures on a double-sided easel, throwing paint at each other, much to the horror of the classroom attendant.”

In an interview to be broadcast on BBC 6 Music today, she said: “Julian had painted a picture, and on that particular day his father turned up with the chauffeur to pick him up from school. I can imagine him painting a figure and saying, ‘That’s my friend Lucy at school’, and his father consequently asking questions. ‘What’s that in the sky?’ or ‘What’s surrounding it?’ ”

Mrs Vodden later found the album in her parents’ record collection. “I remember playing Lucy once and thinking, ‘Oh!’ and not being able to relate to it. When I told a couple of friends that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was about me, they said, ‘No, it can’t be, it’s to do with LSD.’ I was too embarrassed to tell them that I didn’t know what LSD was.”

Cynthia Lennon, Julian’s mother, said years later, after one of Julian’s pop concerts, that she still had the picture. Mrs Vodden said: “It surprised me because I don’t know many mothers of toddlers who keep a picture 18 years on.”

Several Sgt. Pepper songs were inspired by real-life events. She’s Leaving Home was based on a newspaper account of a lovestruck teenage runaway, Melanie Coe.

Ms Coe, who came home safely after a week and now lives in Spain, said: “I love the song but I can’t sit and listen to it. It’s too painful for me.” After a day out with her new boyfriend she felt a sense of anticlimax – “the sky was black and everything felt so dark and dreary” – and jumped on a bus to get away. She first heard the song when working in a Play-boy club. “I thought, ‘That sounds just like me.’ ”

The BBC is celebrating the album’s 40th anniversary with a rerecording by Kaiser Chiefs and Razorlight, using the original studio equipment.

Academics will also debate the record’s cultural influence at a seminar at the University of Leeds this month. The keynote speech will question whether Sgt. Pepper’s “tangerine trees and marmalade skies” set the cultural agenda for the Summer of Love, or were mere optimistic escapism, while other papers will discuss the significance of Sir Peter Blake’s sleeve art.

Forty Years of Sgt. Pepper, a day-long celebration of the album, will be broadcast today on BBC Radio 6 Music. The rerecording will be aired on Radio 2 tomorrow at 9pm and on BBC Two at 10.45pm.

The news behind the words
— The name Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was inspired by the psychedelic bands of the US West Coast
— She’s Leaving Home was composed after Paul McCartney read an article about a schoolgirl runaway
— Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite! was inspired by a 19th-century circus poster found by John Lennon in an antiques shop
— Lovely Rita is McCartney’s tribute to a retired traffic warden. The song was also sparked by a news article
— Good Morning Good Morning is Lennon’s take on the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes advertising jingle, plus the BBC sitcom Meet the Wife
— A Day in the Life was written after Lennon’s friend, Tara Browne, an Irish heiress related to the Guinness family, died in a car crash

Source: Times database

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010