People who weren't around or aware during the 70s and 80s cannot understand how much more densely populated this country has indeed become....Or how reliant upon absolutely CONTINUAL distribution.
Different axle weights, we have to run 6 axles to be legal at 44 tons, even then there isn't a lot of leeway for error.
Britain's population per square mile is just about the highest in Europe and, apart from Japan and Hong Kong i believe one of the highest in the world, rapid population growth with those responsible never planning the infrastructure required.
Anyone who's been on the roads a long time can't fail to be staggered on main routes at the almost constant convoys of lorries near enough 24 hours a day.
Around 1979 to about 83 i used to drive a night trunk up to Leeds and back from Northants, so few were the night trunkers that we most of us knew each other and often met up for a tea and chin wag, in the wee small hours coming back you could drive for half an hour before you saw a lorry coming the other way, some nights you never overtook or was overtaken by a single lorry going your way.
This is just another thing that leads me to distrust the official population figures, which i believe are tens of millions out.
Because its cheaper than some cars are now paying, VED is just another revenue and has no bearing on road useage or damage, have you seen the state of roundabouts in particular but also the inside lanes of dual carriageways on routes used by the heaviest lorries, the roads are crushed and the surface ripped off turn surfaces in a matter of months.
We really can't go on like this, though i don't know what the acceptable answer is, the country is vastly overpopulated and servicing this constantly increasing population has meant massive increases in lorry movements, this exacerbated because we no longer have the regional and local factories that used to service a locality within reason, no room for local industry any more between the retail parks warehouse monstrosities and housing for the good little consumers which keep the former ever expanding buying cheap shit clothes and plastic tat that will last 5 minutes then be thrown and replaced starting the next lot of movements.
We import far too much hence the main ports and chunnell and routes to/from are now bottlenecks, far too much stuff passes through, en route to warehouses...warehouses being our one growth industry. The railways can't possibly cope, rail and road should have been integrated 30 or more years ago along the lines of Freightliner, with fast efficient hubs where containers could be transhipped onto rail for the long haul, we simply don't have the room now and the costs would break the country, which already has a national debt it can't possibly service added to every year by the defecit.
The road miles travelled by most goods are now ridiculous, the infrastructure designed for a population around 25% less than current and we're busy papering over the cracks with hare brained schemes like so called smart motorways, in other words we've run out of road space so hard shoulder running is the sticking plaster idea, which will semi work for a while till they've finished the smart motorway work by which time the population will have risen more than that extra road space can possibly provide for.
The rail does its bit, there are some good container routes, but where they do a good job is shifting aggregates from the outlying pits into that london where its used to build more houses shops offices etc, perpetuating the need for more of the same.
Someone with a big set of bollocks is going to have to stand up one day and say stop, and mean it.
Didn't anyone at the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Boalloy look at this and think 'this is the most depressing looking lorry in the world'? And then decide to put a more cheerful face on it?
Guess this is the right thread for this? Lad I know at work who's into classics found this thing on eBay the other week down south near Cornwall or something. Been sat in a barn for yonks now, but it's got a lot of history.
It's a 1938 Crossley, the exact model is unknown because it seems to be a weird mix between a few. Not sure if anyone here actually knows anything about these, but I did a lot of googling at the time and it seems to be a mix between a Crossley "FWD" of which production didn't start until 1940, seemingly, and the earlier Crossley Beta. It's got a big 100BHP 4 cylinder petrol (I believe 5.3L as that's what the FWD had), a 4 speed gearbox with a 2 speed transfer box (FWD meaning four wheel drive, for the record), manual locking diffs, PTO, vacuum servo hydraulic brakes etc etc. In some ways it actually seems quite sophisticated for the time, in other ways it seems extremely primitive, but overall it's a very interesting beast.
Having been in contact with the company who's name is all over the cab (yes, they're still in business), we've learned that it was used as a balloon winch during the second world war. If I recall correctly, the company owned it twice and it was restored some time in the 50s. The rear tyres are dated 1959 and 1957, so that seems to add up.
Now, after some starter motor fettling it does actually run. I haven't witnessed it running in person yet, but I've been dying to know what a 1930s 4 cylinder with a horrendous exhaust leak sounds like. It isn't perfect by any means and there's a fair bit of work to do on it before it'll drive down the road under its own power again, but mechanically it's all there and structurally it is very solid with only a couple bits of rot on the chassis. The cab is mostly wood and the chassis is covered in very thick old paint, so I'm not really surprised its lasted so long. The biggest issue, I think, is going to be finding any spare bits that it needs aswell as the fact that there is almost no documentation on the internet for these things, so we've no idea what fluids to be putting in it or anything. I have however read on a forum that the Science Museum in Manchester has a complete service manual for one of these things, so might be worth chasing that up. I'll try and get some videos of it running when I can, for anyone who might be interested in such a thing.
Just as a final point, someone briefly mentioned to us recently that RSJ763 isn't actually the right plate for one of these, possibly due to it being a military vehicle. If you put the reg into the DVLA website, it brings up the correct vehicle with the correct year of manufacture but it tells you that the date of first registration was June 1976. Can anyone help shed some light on this weird discrepancy?
***MASSIVE EDIT AND UPDATE - APRIL 2022***
So much more has come to light about the history of WGU18G, 'Ford Timelord', since I originally waded into this tale with no inkling of what I was getting myself into - so I've edited this mega-post to remove incorrect information and clarify new findings, just to avoid my own ill-informed speculation muddying the waters.
I'll probably keep on adding to this as and when more information comes to light in the future.
I've also repaired the broken links to the band's music videos using the official KLF YouTube channel - which didn't exist at the point the original post was strung together.
Bon appetit, kids.
***********************************
It appears that the fate of the original 1968 Ford Galaxie [EDIT: actually a Ford Custom] used by the band for much of their career is, in fact, still unconfirmed, despite strenuous efforts to find out from Darren at the HuntTimelord blog on Wordpress, from which a fair bit of information here has been sourced or confirmed.
The KLF (also known as The JAMs and The Timelords, at different times) used the car for various photoshoots, media appearances and publicity stunts around London and beyond between 1987 and 1991. But there seems to be no solid evidence of exactly what happened to the car beyond 1991 - though there's plenty of speculation.
Regarding the assertion that WGU18G was banger raced - well, while a KLF-liveried US sedan was indeed raced to destruction by Jimmy Cauty at the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Charity Stock Car Race in March 1992, it seems this was not the car on the cover of the Timelords single (and used in one way or another in nearly every other piece of KLF media during their brief but very eventful career).
[EDIT: keep reading, there's much more on this later]
From the pics, the car being raced seems to be a smaller, later Septic model, maybe a late-70s Monarch or (US) Granada - and in fact this may well have been the THIRD 'Ford Timelord' to carry the KLF livery. [EDIT - consensus is that the car raced was a late-70s era Chevrolet Nova.]
According to the band's own blurb on the back of the single 'Doctorin' The Tardis', the car was brought over from the US in the early 1970s by Ford UK to Dagenham, which seems a bit weird. Other accounts indicate it was originally owned by the US Embassy in London, but a recurring rumour is that it was bought up for the filming of either Superman 3 in 1982/83, or Superman 4 in 1986/87 at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire. It was later disposed of as part of a general auction of redundant props.
So the real story begins in the mid-1980s when a plain black 1968 Ford Galaxie with the registration WGU 18G was bought at auction from Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire for "a few hundred quid" by a young chap named Flinton Chalk.
[EDIT: still a bit of uncertainty regarding the exact timeline - it seems that the car was indeed owned by Pinewood, and by Flinton, but it appears that at least two other owners formed part of the backstory. A chap named Chris Bland ran the car briefly in the mid-80s, and says he bought it for £100 from "a guy who was just out of prison and needed the money", before he "swapped it for a Commer caravanette with a guy who made videos… pop videos I think. Nice fella… a bit posh." It's possible he's referring to Flinton here? Or is this before Pinewood? It's still unclear, but here, have a pic or two.]
A quick look through IMCDB does not reveal any listing for a 1968 Ford Custom or Galaxie in either film, even in the background. Most of the US-liveried police cars appearing in the film are early-80s Plymouth Caravelles (for SM3) or late-70s Ford Fairmonts (for the more cash-strapped SM4 production), so it was unlikely to have been mocked up as a police cruiser.
One school of thought held that the aging Ford might have been bought but not used for the scrapyard scene in SM3 (with various smashed yankmobiles garnishing piles of Capris, Minxs and Minis) - but there's no evidence of it appearing on screen.
[EDIT: it turns out this part of the legend is correct - the car was indeed used in shooting for Superman IV in 1986, but the footage was cut from the film after the entire script was rewritten mid-production. However, the cut sections are available as an outtake on the bonus edition of the DVD - and this is apparently the car which would go on to be used by the KLF, below.]
Flinton and his mates appear to have maintained a somewhat puckish outlook on life, and decided to paint the Ford up to look like a police car, spraying the roof and front doors white and completing the effect with a Sheriff-style gold star on the door.
[EDIT: it seems that they were attempting to create a Bluesmobile replica, from the 1980 John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd film 'The Blues Brothers' - but with a cheap 1968 Galaxie rather than a 1974 Dodge Monaco. It seems they also added the lettering 'To Serve and Protect' on the front wings, too.]
They then proceeded to rag the Ford around the fields and laneways near Godstone, Surrey, frequently with a large pirate flag attached, and often while dressed as nuns. As you do.
According to Flinton, "If you drive an American cop car around Surrey dressed as nuns, the police never stop you."
Well, who am I to argue?
After a while, the chums grew tired of this tomfoolery and the car was then sold on to a mate of Flinton's - Jimmy Cauty.
Cauty, at the dawn of 1987, was an artist and musician who had just turned thirty. He'd found a degree of fame in designing a range of top-selling Tolkein-themed posters for Athena while in his late teens, as well as producing the album artwork for a Steeleye Span side project, The King Of Elfland's Daughter.
He'd also played guitar in a number of bands, including John Peel-favoured Angels 1-5, crusty sleaze-rock merchants Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction, and, until they split in late 1986, funk-pop band Brilliant which had been formed by ex-Killing Joke frontman Martin Glover.
Cauty was also a noted petrolhead, riding a series of two-wheeled oddities such as a Panther (with sidecar, which was lost after it caught fire rather alarmingly at a petrol station) and a 1950s Sunbeam 57. He owned and modified the same 1976 Triumph Bonneville 750 for most of his adult life. A journalist interviewing the band for Road Rocket bike mag in 1991 noted all the bits of dismantled bike lying around Cauty's combined home and studio - a squat in Jeffreys Road in Stockwell, London where he'd lived since 1979 along with his wife, the artist and former Angels 1-5 vocalist Cressida Bowyer - which he "didn't have time" to put back together. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
So Jimmy bought Flinton's old Ford Custom around late 1986/early 1987. It was rough as guts after its rural adventures and had some serious rust starting, but for reasons unknown, he bought it for £300.
Early 1987 proved to be an auspicious time in Cauty's life - as out of the blue, on New Year's Day 1987, Bill Drummond called him up.
Drummond had been a theatre set designer, a musician in the band Big In Japan, a record producer and manager, and - most recently - the A&R man for WEA records, who had been responsible for signing Jimmy's ex-band Brilliant.
After pumping substantial sums of money into the group (reputedly half a million pounds), WEA received in return a (less-than-) Brilliant album which was poorly received and flopped in the charts.
In response, Drummond quit the music business on his thirty-third and a third birthday with a rather memorable press release ("I will be 33.5 (sic) years old in September, a time for a revolution in my life. There is a mountain to climb the hard way, and I want to see the world from the top...") He then spent several months having a good think about where to go next. And it involved Jimmy.
While out walking on New Years Day 1987, Drummond formulated a plan to make a hip-hop record. However, "I wasn't brave enough to go and do it myself", he said. "...although I can play the guitar, and I can knock out a few things on the piano, I knew nothing, personally, about the technology. And, I thought, I knew Jimmy [Cauty], I knew he was a like spirit, we share similar tastes and backgrounds in music and things. So I phoned him up that day and said 'Let's form a band called The Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu'. And he knew exactly, to coin a phrase, 'where I was coming from'".
It appears that Jimmy felt the same. In a matter of days, the two were meeting up to jam, and play about with Drummond's favourite toy - a sequencer.
This initial band name - The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, or The JAMs for short - was derived from a fictional subversive cult from the 1970s conspiratorial novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Both artists were massive fans of the books, and Drummond had even designed the sets for a stage adaptation in the mid-70s.
Drummond and Cauty themselves also chose to eschew their everyday names to be known as King Boy D and Rockman Rock within the group - and Jimmy's Ford became quickly referred to as 'The JAMsmobile'. Soon it became an integral part of the band's somewhat idiosyncratic and aggressive approach to the business of making music.
Early on, the car received its first bout of customisation - the 'Pyramid Blaster' logo appeared over Flinton's gold star on the doors, and 'Deep Shit' lettering (referring to the name of an early track) obscured Flinton's 'To Serve and Protect' lettering on the wing - but they were paper decals stuck on with spraymount.
This pic, taken in London by photographer Phil Nicholls around the time of their debut single release 'All You Need Is Love' in May 1987 (and a bare five months after the duo began making music together), is one of the first known pics of WGU with the band.
Shots taken from the same photoshoot, showing the band wearing Lone Ranger masks, went on to be published in Melody Maker, and later used in posters.
[EDIT: Not sure why the photo credit's given to Tim Jarvis in the MM, as Phil Nicholls apparently shot those pics - unless there was more than one photographer snapping away as the duo posed around the Ford?
phil nicholls (@philnichollsphotography) • Instagram photos and videos ]
As media attention grew around the band, by mid-1987 the success of their self-released single 'All You Need Is Love' (in both original white-label and re-edited commercial formats, which became NME's Single Of The Week) had generated enough money to record and manufacture a full-length album. Since Drummond and Cauty refused to sign to a commercial record label, they retained complete control of their output through their self-owned label and merch business, The Sound of Mu(sic).
One downside to this was the lack of financial leverage to access an advance on sales, so having to rely on the profits (if any) from one project to bankroll the next became the standard JAMs modus operandi.
The other downside was a lack of legal advice, coupled with a strong conviction that what they were making was art, not music.
When their debut LP, '1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?)' hit the shelves in June 1987, the duo found themselves facing more than just mixed reviews from a public unsure how to react to their blend of scratchy sampling, beatboxing and "cryptic, political rapping" that characterised the JAMs sound. They also unexpectedly found themselves embroiled in a high-profile copyright battle with ABBA, of all people.
Speaking on Norwegian radio in 1991, Bill Drummond summarised the episode thusly:
'We'd just got ourselves a sampler, and we went sample-crazy. We just ... went through my whole collection of records, sampling tons of stuff and putting it all together, and it ... was a real rush of excitement, when we were doing it.... When we put that record out, we knew what we were doing was illegal, but we thought it was gonna be such an underground record, nobody would ever hear about it. So the first thing that shocked us is that British rock papers gave a big review.'
A track on Side 2, 'The Queen and I', heavily sampled 'Dancing Queen' (i.e. the entire chorus) - and ABBA's management were not best pleased. A writ from the MCPS (Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society) resulted in a court order that the record be withdrawn from sale and all copies destroyed, together with a demand that the band also relinquish the master tape, mothers, stampers and any other parts commensurate with manufacture of the record.
It appeared that the disclaimer written around the edge of the disc, where one might commonly find the usual copyright blurb, had limited currency in a court of law.
('All sounds on this recording have been captured by The KLF in the name of Mu, we hereby liberate these sounds from all copyright restrictions, without prejudice. A KLF Communication')
Never ones to back down, Drummond and Cauty decided that the best course of action was to travel to Sweden to meet with ABBA and explain their artistic vision in person. Which they did. In the Ford Custom, now featuring a paint version of the Pyramid Blaster logo.
Crammed in, alongside most of the unsold and returned copies of the album, was an NME jourmalist and photographer brought along to document the pilgrimage.
Their laudable mission in September 1987 was not a stunning success. One fan blog, KLF Online, describes the episode as follows:
'So the JAMs and their guests took the ferry to Sweden, drove cross-country to Stockholm where they presented a gold disc “in recognition of sales in excess of zero” to a blonde prostitute outside Abba’s studio at 3am (!) in the morning. The photographs of this were supposed to convince the world that this was Agnetha, now fallen on hard times.
'They obviously failed to get a meeting with Benny and Bjorn (if they even tried) and they set off back to England, stopping in a Swedish field to build a fire out of the unsold copies of 1987, a scene which is captured on the cover of ‘Who Killed The JAMs’ and 'History Of The JAMs’.
'As they returned to the JAMs-mobile to drive off, an irate Swedish farmer appeared, furious at the heap of burning vinyl giving off acrid black smoke in his field, who proceeded to fire a shotgun at the JAMs-mobile as it drove off. Further down the road the unfortunate car broke down perhaps helped by the shotgun, but luckily (and not so romantically) the JAMs had taken out AA membership before they left and they got towed home.
If anyone has access to a copy of the NME from 17 October 1987, apparently the writeup of this event is hilarious. It really does sound like the ultimate shiter journey.
In 'Justified and Ancient History', Pete Robinson states that on the ferry home they played their only live date in exchange for a Toblerone bar from the duty-free shop, and they chucked some more copies of the LP over the side of the boat into the North Sea.
The band later gave this version of events to Melody Maker:
Rockman: "We had this big burning ceremony in Sweden. We were bombing down this country road at about six in the morning, we turned off down this dirt track that led to some farms. It was gorgeous, the sun was just coming up, there were these huge Nordic forests either side - Noggin The Nog and all that. We found a field we were happy with and piled up all the records and set fire to them. The smoke was incredible. This huge plume was going right down the valley and collecting above a farmhouse. It was obvious that something really dodgy was going on. Suddenly this farmer appeared with a gun and started shooting at us."
King Boy: "We jumped into the car and left very quickly."
Rockman: "Two minutes later, we were in the outside lane doing about a hundred and there was this huge explosion - the whole engine just blew up. A bullet must have hit it. In the end we were towed all the way back to England."
King Boy: "Luckily we'd just joined the AA the day before. We got five star cover cos I was an associate member. It cost us 40 quid and saved us 400."
Hmm. A lurid account, though as both I and Captain 70s know, a car engine can self destruct without being hit by a bullet (hint - pulling 100mph in a decrepit old septic tank might not have been a top idea). There were also rumours that the band had hit and killed a moose while on the roadtrip, but I would imagine that any such encounter would have totalled even as sturdy a car as the Ford. Other reports suggested it was 'a really big dog' that was hit.
[EDIT; it has since come to light, following discussions with some of the key players, that the original WGU18G's journey ended at this point.
I spoke very briefly to Bill Drummond after a screening of his 'White Saviour Complex' film and play in Belfast in September 2019, and he advised that there were in fact TWO 'Ford Timelords'.
Jimmy later wrote to Darren at the HuntTimelord blog:
"I planned to replace the engine but during the night of the great storm of 1987 a large tree branch fell on the car and smashed the windscreen and made a massive dent in the roof. It was decided it was un-fixable so I set about finding a replacement.
"Another Ford Galaxy was located, it was the same year, same everything, but like the original car this one had virtually no brakes and was in pretty bad shape so a perfect match, apart from the paint job which was bright red.
" So, I took as much as I could from the first car, doors, hood, trunk door, number plate and fitted it badly onto the new car, painted it all black and hey presto police car number 2
"What was left on the original car was towed away to the scrap yard.
"NOTE: Technically a number plate should not be taken from one car and attached to another but this was a show biz emergency so it was ok."]
As a form of protest after this escapade, in October 1987 The JAMs released '1987: The JAMs 45 Edits' - which was the same LP as before but with all the uncleared samples stripped out, leaving mostly silence, some percussion and other scratchy instrumentation, and their own vocals. This record, sold as a 12" single rather than an album because there was less than 25 minutes of audible content, was made available commercially but also offered as a 'prize' to anyone who posted back their original copy of 1987.
Somewhat sarcastically, the sleevenotes to '45 Edits' came with detailed instructions on how to legally replicate the sound of the original album in the comfort of your own home or studio:
This record is a version of our now deleted and illegal LP '1987, What The Fuck Is Going On?' with all of the copyright infringing 'samples' edited out. As this leaves less than 25 minutes of music we are able to sell it as a 12-inch 45. If you follow the instructions below you will, after some practice, be able to simulate the sound of our original record. To do this you will need 3 wired-up record decks, a pile of selected discs, one t.v. set and a video machine loaded with a cassette of edited highlights of last weeks 'Top of the Pops'. Deck one is to play this record on, the other two are to scratch in the missing parts using the selected records. For added authentic effect you could use a Roland 808 drum machine (well cheap and what we used in the original recordings) to play along behind your scratching.
They soon after declared that the spat with ABBA was over, with no further legal action pending since the offending records had been removed from circulation.
By December 1987, the band were to be found merrily defacing billboards for the benefit of the Melody Maker photographer as part of the same interview referenced above, using the Ford as a handy ladder.
[EDIT: this seems to be the first known photos showing the second Ford to be used by the band - even though some of the panels have been swapped, you can see here that the roughly applied black and white paintwork isn't quite the same as before, and the bumpers are now black rather than chrome]
In February 1988, The JAMs released their second album, Who Killed the JAMs?', which featured the original WGU18G on the cover - one of the photographs taken by the NME snapper at the tail end of their Swedish saga, with the smoke rising from the heap of burning LPs and cassettes.
The duo had also taken to issuing somewhat rambling, conversational press releases under the title of 'KLF Communications'.
In the second such press release, in January 1988, Bill Drummond said "We might put out a couple of 12" records under the name The K.L.F., these will be rap free just pure dance music, so don't expect to see them reviewed in the music papers".
Their label and merch side had by now changed its name to KLF Communications (possibly standing for Kopyright Liberation Front - though alternative explanations also exist).
In March 1988, the duo made their first release as 'The KLF' - 'Burn The Beat', an instrumental version of the album track 'Burn The Bastards'.
Soon after, the Ford starred on the cover of the duo's next release: 'Doctorin' The Tardis' (below), as well as the video for the same single, in May 1988.
At this stage, the band had taken to using the nom de plume of 'The Timelords', with Drummond and Cauty changing their alter-ego names to Time Boy and Lord Rock respectively. The sleevenotes indicated that the Ford was now elevated to full band member status - the frontman, in fact - and various spoof 'interviews' with the car were circulated to an incredulous music press.
The video mainly involves the Ford driving past some mystical landscaping such as Avebury and the White Horse of Westbury before being ragged around an airfield and driving into tea-chest 'Daleks' that look like they were knocked together for a primary school drama production.
It also shows that lights on the roof and grille had now been added, along with the number 23 on the roof - apparently a significant number in the mystic numerological treatises both band members were heavily into - and KLF lettering on the bonnet and bootlid . It also shows substantial rustholes in the lower quarters of the car.
[EDIT: the back of the singles sleeve made mention of 'Ford Timelord' supposedly being brought over to Dagenham in 1970. While this seems incorrect for the original WGU18G, reputedly an ex-US Embassy car, maybe it was correct for the replacement red Ford?]
The single went to Number 1 in the UK charts, despite media disgust at its "rancid reworking of ancient discs" (Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll Part 2, The Sweet's Blockbuster).
The plan to bring Ford Timelord into the Top of the Pops studio to appear on stage was apparently nixed by BBC executives.
The band capitalised on this notoriety for their book the following year, The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) - which guaranteed a Number 1 chart hit if all steps were followed, regardless of musical talent, or your money back. Europop outfit Edelweiss famously did just that, while ten years later Chumbawamba also successfully applied these principles to achieve that same feat with 'Tubthumping'. The Klaxons also claimed they'd followed the KLF's methodology to score chart success.
With the press still unsure if it was all a novelty joke, but mindful of the public's appetite for a band that had moved quickly from the experimental electronic fringes to the pop mainstream, the Ford appeared in many music magazine photoshoots about The Timelords. After all, the car was a full band member. Apparently.
But within a month or two, the band ditched the Timelords monicker and were now back to calling themselves after their label: The KLF.
In July 1988, The KLF gave a very low-key release to a 12" single of what they called 'Pure Trance' - a dance instrumental titled 'What Time Is Love?' They didn't promote it, and not long afterwards they hopped on another ferry in the Galaxie.
Following all the Timelords press hype, the '68 Galaxie was again taken on an overseas jaunt - this time to star in the band's self-penned road trip odyssey The White Room, a sort of hazy mystical road-trip movie that begins in London and ends on a mountaintop high in the Spanish Sierra Nevada.
Funded using the considerable profits from the Timelords single - even after the sample royalties had been paid - the film involved two weeks of driving through Spain, which generated about six hours of raw footage.
Overall, it did not go well - and the film has still never seen an official release.
A KLF Communications press release in August 1990 summarised the episode:
Driving down the Marylebone Road on a wet September afternoon in 1988 in their infamous U>S> Cop car, Cauty suggested, instead of doing the art exhibition they should make a film. The making of a "Road Movie" had always figured in their vague plans for the future. With money coming in from all over the place for their Timelords record maybe now was the time. Or at least they thought so.
They contacted their friend and associate, the film director, Bill Butt. Made plans. Put budgets together. Worked on story boards. Six weeks from that September afternoon they were filming in the Sierra Nevada region of Spain (Spaghetti Western Country). The crew they were working with were the best. Most of them had just finished working with Spielberg on his latest INDIANA JONES adventure.
Things started to go wrong immediately. The weather, guaranteed to be blue skies of epic proportions until well after Christmas, was low and drizzly. In filmatic terms this was disastrous. Then while they were out there business deals started to stagger and crash. It was the money from these deals that was to finance the completion of the picture. Of course if you talk to anybody who tries to make a film they will tell you of the catalogue of disasters that came between them and their reported triumphant premier. Drummond and Cauty had no experience of this. They just felt that the Gods were against them.
On their return to the U.K. in December 1988, they viewed all of the uncut rushes that had been shot. They knew then that they had just thrown away the best part of £250,000.
The footage included the car zipping through abandoned sets built for 1970s Sergio Leone films; a still of which was later used on the front of their next single as The KLF, Kylie Said To Jason.
The video for this single also featured footage intended for The White Room. Although the single, released in July 1989, had every intention of replicating the chart success of 'Doctorin' The Tardis' (thereby generating enough money to finish the film) it surprisingly stalled, failing to even break into the UK Top 100.
Seriously short of cash after their Iberian (non)adventure and disappointed with the footage, the film was put on permanent hiatus - though a different 'soundtrack album' with the same name was later released in spring 1991.
If you've watched the film footage shown above, you'll note that about two thirds of the way through, the Galaxie receives a somewhat less than concours repaint with a bucket of whitewash. It seems that this was what Drummond and Cauty were referencing when they started slapping white gloss onto the fan replica of Ford Timelord at the K Foundation curated Welcome To The Dark Ages event in 2017, as mentioned further upthread.
You can see from video stills that the bodywork of the Galaxie was, by this stage, pretty much falling to bits. One of the blue lights on the grille has fallen off en route, leaving only the backing plate.
The arches are plainly hanging off it.
Jimmy Cauty later seemed to regret this whole episode, rather:
'After "Doctorin' the Tardis" [...] it was a bit complicated and it went through a lot of different phases. With the money that we made from "Doctorin' the Tardis" we stupidly thought that we could just go and make a road movie, without a script, without a story, without anything. We thought, well, we'll just go to Spain in the car, and just film what happens and of course we went there and nothing happened, it just rained.'
Nonetheless, the car appeared to survive both its excursion to the continent and the ad-hoc paint job, as it was brought back to Jimmy's squat - now also the KLF's official HQ and recording studio, known as Trancentral - at the tail end of 1988. But despite its Timelord status, time seemed to be running out for it.
In early 1989 (going by the trees, heavy coats and general air of coldness), the duo were interviewed for BBC Television's Snub TV programme, a youth-oriented music show that focused on up and coming British indie acts.
The Ford features heavily in the interview - and is looking extremely rough, with the driver's door seemingly flapping loose at one point.
[Edit: Jimmy wrote on the HuntTimelord blog:
"After filming the white room movie in Spain the car came back to London and just sat broken down in our front garden of Trancentral for quite a long time, it was painted white for the final scene of that movie and was unusable".
So although the segment features extensive footage taken from The White Room filming, it's not clear whether this was filmed before or after the trip to Spain.]
I particularly like Jimmy's muttered comment,"it's just my car, I drive it everyday", in response to suggestions that the Ford is a contrived image thing.
DVLA records show that not long afterwards, in April 1989, the tax expired on the Ford. Whether the journey ultimately killed it, or it was just too rough to use as daily transport, is unclear. It's possible it just ran out of MOT and, like Cauty's ongoing bike projects, he just didn't quite get around to sorting it. In fairness, it looks like it would need a lot of sorting.
At some point, it was also loaned out for the video to Beatmasters with MC Merlin's 'Who's In The House?' released in 1989. Exactly when this promo was shot is unclear - given that it seems to be free from white paint, this may have been before the Spanish odyssey.
In fact, two big Yank police cars put in an appearance in this music video, and it seems that the other (only seen in the background) is a 1971 Ford LTD Custom in similar black and white livery, which also briefly belonged to Cauty - as seen below, outside Trancentral.
This '71 Ford, JLE 67K, was a known car on the Surrey custom and classic scene, and was possibly bought as a replacement for the swiss-cheese Galaxie. However, apparently the new car wouldn't run right and other than the Beatmasters video, it seems to have had very few public appearances. Consequently, around March 1989 the LTD was sold for £500 as a non-runner to Simon 'Gen' Matthews, the drummer in the band Jesus Jones, who brought a tame mechanic along when he went to pick it up.
The mechanic simply swapped the HT leads round the right way, and the LTD's big V8 fired straight up. Cauty then expressed doubts about whether he now wanted to let the car go, but Matthews reminded him that the deal had been done.
Matthews then used it for hooning round London, and although he enjoyed the attention it quickly transpired that this car was also very, very rotten. With Jesus Jones' star in the ascendant following the success of their single Info Freako, Matthews found himself on tour or in the studio all the time, recording their debut LP Liquidiser. With limited time or energy to work on it, the '71 Ford ran out of MOT and sat outside a friend's house for a year or so, deteriorating further.
As far as Matthews can recall, he agreed to its disposal since it was simply in the way, and the LTD was sold on to persons unknown while he was out of the country. It was last taxed in 1993, and quite possibly no longer exists.
Matthews recalls that Cauty contacted him a few months after he'd sold him the Ford LTD, around mid/late 1989, asking if he could borrow it back since the Ford Custom was now a non-runner. Matthews cheerfully declined. So that seems to square with the idea that the original Ford Timelord ultimately became borked.
If The JAMs were characterised as off-kilter old-school hip hop with samples, and The Timelords' solitary release reviled by critics as the worst kind of novelty trash-pop, The KLF themselves were now moving in a more house trance direction.
As mentioned, they had banged out a series of rap-free dance 12"s during 1988 and 89, but these seem to have been released with minimal fanfare around the time they were planning, filming and roughly editing The White Room and also producing its unfinished soundtrack. These dance releases didn't trouble the UK charts and largely sank without trace.
Cauty was also busy working with Alex Paterson around this time in an early incarnation of The Orb.
1988's 'What Time Is Love?' , however, had proved a minor sensation in European discos, giving rise to a number of unauthorised cover versions by other atrists which Drummond and Cauty gathered together over the course of nine months, pressing them up as an album called 'The What Time Is Love Story' in September 1989 - reasoning that since no-one had asked permission to cover their song, they didn't see why they needed to ask permission to resell someone else's version of it.
Another of their studio albums, 'Chill Out' (now heralded as a deeply influential ambient house record) was released in February 1990 to positive reviews but failed to set the world, or the charts, alight.
A follow-up single, 'Last Train to Trancentral' - a reworking of an older unreleased White Room soundtrack cut, 'E-Train To Trancentral' - was launched the following month, the third of their 'Pure Trance' releases. It received limited promotion, and soon sank.
Cauty seemed by now to be moving away from The KLF, as in addition to his work with The Orb, he also recorded his own solo album project under the name Space and released it in mid-1990, to general indifference from critics and record buyers alike.
But, oddly, just as The KLF's members were beginning to rethink both their musical and cinematic ambitions, a strange thing happened.
Orders from mainland Europe started to arrive for their older 'Pure Trance' singles; a trickle first, and then a flood. The burgeoning rave and acid house scene was hungry for big, bass-heavy electro, the wonkier the better. It seemed that The KLF's music fitted the bill. And it wasn't just the hardcore ravers who wanted it - so did the record-buying public at large.
'What Time Is Love?' received a 'Live at Trancentral' remix and a rerelease - becoming a smash hit the second time around in July 1990, when it peaked at No.5 in the UK charts.
The Ford then put in what appears to have been its final public appearance in the European-release video for the single '3am Eternal'.
It also appears on the cover of at least one version of the single - which might seem odd, since it had been untaxed for nearly two years at that point.
In the video, the Ford can be seen apparently driving at night through Parliament Square, Tower Bridge and the Blackwall Tunnel - with Cauty in the driving seat, Drummond riding shotgun, plus guest rapper Ricardo Da Force and two female vocalists in the back.
The damage to the leading edge of the front offside wing, apparently inflicted by a Dalek shunt during the 'Doctorin' The Tardis' video, confirms that it's the same car as before, and not a lookalike.
NME writer Roger Morton was on-set for the video, writing in January 1991:
"On the night when I met them in Battersea they [...] were merely filming a video for their murderously powerful, remixed re-release of their 1989 club hit '3am Eternal'. Being The KLF, however, this involves Jimmy sitting in the ruined hulk of The KLF's customised US cop car, being dragged on a trailer through the streets of London..."
[EDIT: So it appears that while the Ford was indeed used in public for the first time in well over a year, it was not in the best of states. The video shots indicate a camera trailer rig was used for the close-up shots - and the scenes in which the Ford appears to be moving under its own power seem to have been cribbed from footage shot for The White Room, some three years previously.
Jimmy went on to say:
"We used the cop car one more time for the video for 3am Eternal in 1991, It was a non runner by this time so we scraped the white paint off the windows and put it on a filming low loader, and just did some internal shots while driving around London, we cut some holes in the roof to allow for additional lighting."]
Realistically, the car may not have been a runner since Cauty's begging phonecall to Gen Matthews a year and a half earlier.
Either way, what we do know is that the photographer Jon Mace stopped by Trancentral at some point and took some pictures of the car resting on the overgrown drive of 55 Jeffreys Road. It has a distinct aura of 'abandoned car', although some effort had been made to repair its ragged arches in the intervening two years - possibly for the '3am Eternal' video shoot? But with the door bottoms seemingly made of adhesive tape and the sills rotted out, it clearly still needed an enormous amount of work to be made roadworthy.
EDIT: after finding these pics, and while trying to get a fix on when the car was last sighted in the KLF's possession, I contacted Jon, who was lovely - and he replied:
"Yes I can confirm that the car pictures were taken in November 1991.
"I visited Jimmy and Cressida at Benio's that day to do a video interview ('terribly' I hasten to add!) for my BA Hons Degree - end of year thesis, which of course I did on the KLF.
"They were amazingly helpful and invited me in and allowed me to chat and film. I was then invited to meet Bill at Lillyyard Studios where they were working on The White Room.
"Footage was taken there too, Bill also was amazingly open and helpful, and it was fantastic to be in the studio while they were working."
Now, this is interesting stuff but mildly problematic in terms of timeline, as The White Room' LP was released in March 1991 - so I'm not sure how they could still have been working on it in November the same year.
I checked with Jon that he didn't mean November 1990, but he was sure it was 1991 as that was when he was putting together his thesis.
In his correspondence with Darren at HuntTimelord blog, Jimmy stated:
"I’m not sure what happened to the car after that shoot [the video for '3am Eternal, in December 1990], I think we left it at Pinewood studios on the back lot then never bothered to pick it up, it might still be there who knows. I think it’s still registered to my name."
So Jimmy reckons that the Ford never came back to Trancentral at 55 Jeffreys Rd after the video was shot at the tail end of 1990.
November 1990 would agree with the recording of The White Room album and the efforts to clean the white paint off the Ford in preparation for the video shoot. By November 1991 the album had been released, the Ford had been banger raced, and Jimmy Cauty had moved out of the house in Jeffreys Road.
I'd have to say that I think there's been confusion over which year this photoshoot took place. But more on this later.]
Bearing scant relevance to the long-developed film and soundtrack of the same name, these thumping new versions of older tracks further developed their pop-trance-house sound, and flew to No.5 in the UK album chart. Retrospective views now laud this LP as "the commercial and artistic peak of late-'80s acid-house".
Further singles followed on, with the band now seen as hot property within the music business.
'Last Train To Trancentral' was released April 1991, reaching UK chart #2. It doesn't feature the '68 Ford in the video - but it does feature at least one plastic model of a (flying) c.1964 Galaxie dressed up in a similar livery to the real-life car, as well as a model train hurtling through a dystopian model layout.
Yet another version of 'What Time Is Love?' followed soon after - this time remixed in their 'Stadium House' style and released in October 1991 as 'America: What Time Is Love?' for the US market only, with erstwhile Black Sabbath singer Glenn Hughes providing vocals.
It climbed to #57 in the Billboard Top 100 based solely on word of mouth and radio airplay, since the duo made no effort at all to promote their music across the Atlantic, and had no major label clout behind them.
At the same time, a UK release arrived in October 1991 too - a revised version of a white label track they'd knocked out the year before, titled 'It's Grim Up North' - which seemed to mark the end of their Stadium Trance era with a new industrial techno grind. Perversely put out using their old JAMs moniker, this still managed to make No.10 in the UK Charts.
Finally, their 'Justified & Ancient' single appeared right at the tail end of 1991, based on samples dating all the way back in 1987 - and featuring, somewhat unexpectedly, a juxtaposition of both Tammy Wynette and a Morrison-bodied Bedford CF ice cream van.
Its gleefully daft and luxuriant Nubian court video was a massive contrast to the monochrome Grim Up North video released only a few weeks earlier - and also contained clips of the Ford from the White Room footage - so it was no wonder that fans couldn't decide whether they were acid-house ravers, grimy industrial technoheads, or just a pair of dayglo chancers happy to grab hold of anything that tickled their ears.
The truth, as ever, probably lies somewhere in between.
The KLF ended 1991 at a commercial peak, having sold millions of records to net them the title of the biggest-selling band in the UK that year, and with it came a coveted invitation to open the 1992 BRIT Awards.
So, being the KLF, they decided to use the event to commit artistic suicide.
On the evening of 12 February 1992, Drummond and Cauty arrived on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon along with crust-punks Extreme Noise Terror, to open the awards ceremony with a proto death-metal performance of '3am Eternal''.
It was massively loud, and described as 'violently antagonistic' to the audience of record label luvvies - as well as millions of BBC viewers watching the live show at home.
Note the use of a blue flashing dome lamp on the amp stack - perhaps a oblique nod to Ford Timelord?
Then, in an apparent tribute to both William Wallace and Hannibal from 'The A Team', a crutch-toting, kilted and cigar-chomping Drummond unexpectedly fired a machine gun into the audience. It was loaded with blanks, but the noise was still somewhat terrifying indoors.
Leaving the stage to the PA announcement "The KLF have now left the music business", the smattering of bemused applause showed that the luvvies were not best pleased. That nice Chesney Hawkes wouldn't have pulled a stunt like that.
Later in the evening, Drummond and Cauty dumped a dead sheep on the steps of the afterparty venue with the message "I died for you (bon appetit)" tied around it, as a cheery farewell from this swirling art-terrorist circus.
This was not, apparently, scripted.
According to Bill Drummond, the plan had been to also throw buckets of sheep blood from an abattoir into the audience at the Odeon, but Extreme Noise Terror - all vegans - said they wouldn't come on stage if this were to go ahead. So The KLF backed down on that, apparently leaving Bill with a van full of congealing blood to dispose of the next day.
There was much sound and fury from the tabloids and music press, and the group responded by giving a UK release to 'America: What Time Is Love?' single which, in the aftermath, charted at #4..
Although Cauty and Drummond regrouped with Extreme Noise Terror in the weeks after this escapade to work on their next LP, 'The Black Room', the sessions were apparently unproductive.
In May 1992, a further KLF Communications release appeared:
"We have been following a wild and wounded, glum and glorious, shit but shining path these past five years. The last two of which has led us up onto the commercial high ground — we are at a point where the path is about to take a sharp turn from these sunny uplands down into a netherworld of we know not what. For the foreseeable future there will be no further record releases from The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Timelords, The KLF and any other past, present and future name attached to our activities. As of now all our past releases are deleted .... If we meet further along be prepared ... our disguise may be complete."
That was it. The KLF/JAMs/Timelords were suddenly no more.
Blimey.
So - what had happened to WGU 18G amongst all this hoo-hah?
Well, to come back in where we started, one version of the story seems to run that Drummond and Cauty intended to destroy the original Ford Timelord at the a proposed 'Pop Stars vs DJs' charity fundraiser in March 1992, a few weeks after their announcement of a withdrawal from the music industry.
[EDIT: However, this seems unlikely. Photographs and programmes have since emerged to indicate that the second Ford, the one procured in late 1987 and later monickered Ford Timelord, was already dead - having been raced to destruction at a banger race at Swaffham on 30 June 1991, by Paul Bickers.
Although Bickers' main job was film production facilities, contrary to my hunch he actually had nothing to do with the filming of the 3am Eternal video, and apparently obtained the car "through one of his contacts in the film industry". This backs up the idea that the Ford was basically abandoned at Pinewood after the video was shot.
He also confirmed that the Ford was then scrapped after the race meeting. It's possible that this story has become tangled up with the charity race Jimmy was involved in, after which Bickers had taken the smashed Nova back to his yard in Norfolk - maybe giving rise to reports that Ford Timelord was stashed away at a unit in Norfolk.]
Cauty had moved out of 'Trancentral,' by late 1991 - allegedly because his DIY improvements had caused interior load-bearing walls to collapse - and so if the Ford was still around, it would have needed to be removed too.
[EDIT: you can probably ignore this next bit, as Jimmy's since gone on record to say he hadn't seen the car since he left it behind at Pinewood Studios after filming the video for 3am Eternal.)
One rumour suggested that the non-running car was winched onto a trailer and taken from its resting place on the London driveway to a storage facility outside Norwich, where a lot of the band's studio gear was stashed. Since the car had been with them from the very beginning of the band's career, had appeared in so many videos, record sleeves and photoshoots, it could be argued that killing the car was as good a way as any to declare that the band was dead too.
In any event, Cauty procured a rough US car (what appears to have been a blue late-70s Chevrolet Nova) for the banger racing event in March 1992. With assistance from banger racer, Paul Bickers, he hastily prepped and painted it up over the course of three days, before taking the wheel in the charity demolition derby. Apparently he only just made it to the Wimbledon race in time, with his car being the final entry on the grid.
[EDIT: It's interesting that Cauty and Paul Bickers clearly knew each other well enough to work together on this charity project, yet seemingly Paul never told Jimmy that he'd raced his Ford at Swaffham nine months earlier - with Jimmy still wondering as late as last year that maybe the Ford's still sitting at Pinewood Studios.
The fact that the KLF and Pyramid Blaster logos were preserved during the paint prep on the Ford shows that Bickers must have had some inkling of what they meant, and you'd think that recreating them on this blue Chevy might have jogged someone's memory. Unless Jimmy has since forgotten that they had talked about this? I guess we'll never know.]
And then the plot thickens further. The ex-KLF members were now wealthy men. And they were uncomfortable with this.
Basically, this tragic state of affairs boiled down to the fact that once there were no new KLF projects upcoming, there was nothing on which to spend the royalty money still coming in. The band's ethos was always that the money from one project bankrolled the next, but even though the band had deliberately deleted their back catalogue to prevent further record sales royalties accruing, mechanical royalties from airplay kept rolling in. The duo reportedly refused to to touch the money themselves, and so by 1994 the band had amassed a total of £1.8m - which left them with £1m after tax.
Many, many uses were mooted, but frustrated - the band caused a minor adminstrative panic when they withdrew the £1m balance in bank notes from the National Westminster bank (reputedly the biggest cash withdrawal the bank had ever handled) and nailed them to a pine frame and declared it an artwork titled 'Money: A Substantial Body of Cash' - but it was pooh-poohed by museum curators who refused to display it and dismissed the whole thing as having been done before, but better.
An 'interactive' event in early 1994, whereby journalists were given large bags of cash, chauffeured by limos to a tent in a forest, and then invited to nail their bundles of notes to smaller frames, fell into disarray when some of the sticky-fingered scribblers skimmed the bags - and in some cases, made off with the entire amount. This event was patrolled by two ex-army Humber armoured cars, appropriately painted for the K Foundation (as their post-band activities were now known):
Efforts to take the cash/artwork on tour were hampered by niggling insurance problems. The band had previously been known for throwing thousands of pounds in banknotes marked with cryptic messages into concert audiences, but they were no longer performing so this was not an outlet. There was the intention to set up a foundation to help struggling artists, until the duo realised that in order to make powerful art, the artist needed to experience struggle - handing over cash for a cushy lifestyle might help the artist on a personal level, but on not a professional one.
So they came up with a typically unorthodox solution.
"Jimmy said: 'Why don't we just burn it?' remembers Drummond. 'He said it in a light-hearted way, I suppose, hoping I'd say: 'No, we can't do that, let's do this...' But it seemed the most powerful thing to do."
In August 1994, the duo travelled to the Scottish Island of Jura where they performed one of their best-known stunts/art pieces (delete as appropriate) - the burning of a million pounds in cash.
Jim Reid, a journalist who travelled to Jura with the pair to act as the 'independent witness' to their art happening, wrote an article about the event titled Money To Burn, where he described the experience as "initially horrifying, but then just really boring" - since it took the duo several hours to physically drop all the bundles of notes into the small fireplace in the boathouse they'd chosen as a location.
Moreover, the strong draught from the flue ensured that approx. £10k worth of notes did not burn, but were sucked straight up the chimney only to drift to earth outside - with one bemused local apparently gathering around £1,500 of the scattered, slightly singed notes before handing them in to Jura's police station.
The whole event was filmed by their long-term collaborator Alan 'Gimpo' Goodrick, at Cauty and Drummond's request. However, the next day Drummond demanded that all the video footage shot was also burned - and the master tapes were duly immolated in the same fireplace.
However, it later came out that a record of the event did exist after all, as - possibly anticipating such an action - Gimpo had created an additional video copy of the footage overnight.
Exactly one year after the burning event, in August 1995, a tour began around the country under the heading The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid, where the saved footage was screened and Drummond and Cauty invited the audience to discuss what their reasons for doing so might have been.
However, the planned tour was cut short in November, when Drummond and Cauty summoned a bunch of cold and bemused journalists to Cape Wrath, the most north-westerly point of Scotland.
There, they wrote out a contract in gloss paint on a hired Nissan Bluebird, banning themselves from discussing the money-burning episode for a full 23 years - a vow of silence until the year 2017. They then shoved the unfortunate vehicle off the handy nearby cliff. As you do.
Well, I suppose it wasn't really the right size to fit into their solicitor's filing cabinet, hey? Bet that was an interesting* conversation afterwards with the hire desk bod.
Getting back to the point of this thread, it's been mooted that the intention was to honour the vehicle that had a role in the million quid being amassed in the first place - with a final starring role for the Ford in this piece of performance art.
[Edit: Jon Mace mentioned in his email that Jimmy had talked about "driving it off a cliff, or planning to", which may give further credence to this theory.]
Possibly the Ford, if it still existed at this point, proved in no fit state to travel up north, even on a trailer, but whatever the reasoning might be, the hapless Nissan ended up sacrificed.
Some say that Ford Timelord, the KLF's iconic 1968 Ford Custom, is still sitting in a storage compound in Norfolk, and still rusting.
This theory was given an additional push by an art installation by Jimmy Cauty in 2013, Aftermath Dislocation Principle, which contained a scale model of the original Ford Timelord hidden behind some shipping containers. This doesn't appear to be the same model used in the 'The Last Train To Trancentral' video, btw.
The '68 Ford police car has become an icon to fans of the band and their output, because of its high profile in so many of the band's seminal works and moments, and understandably replicas have been created (hey, I'd roll in one).
It appears that this was the impetus behind the controversial 'paint incident', where KLF superfan and member of 'The 400', Phil Blake, had his lovingly recreated Ford Timelord receive some unexpected attention from his heroes during the K Foundation's Welcome To The Dark Ages event in 2017, a three day extravaganza in Liverpool to 'celebrate' the expiry of their self-imposed 23-year moratorium on discussing the 'burn £1m' episode.
Before the event opened, Drummond and Cauty had put out a warning that any fans discovered bringing old KLF memorabilia along with them would have it confiscated and destroyed.
It seems that they operated a typically hardline stance on that policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq6XJl9xw80
But you'll be pleased to learn that this car survived after a clean-up of the gloss paint, although some drips on the interior and along the shutlines remain as a memento of that particular, erm, art happening.
Drummond and Cauty had found a pink Morrison CF ice cream van to use for the launch of their book, 2023, so it's not that they appear utterly opposed to replica vehicles used in their past exploits.
Maybe they just felt too much of a connection to the 'original' WGU to tolerate a fake? Who knows?
So there we go. WGU's status is still complex and uncertain, but there's a very slim chance it may have survived.
[EDIT: after a huge amount of effort from the AS Hivemind, and mining vital information from all sorts of key players involved with the band and the car, it seems the answer to Bren's original question goes as follows:
The original WGU car - the black ex-US Embassy, ex-Superman IV Ford Custom, known as the JAMsmobile - was towed away for scrap in late 1987, by Jimmy Cauty's account, following its total engine failure in Sweden and subsequent storm damage to the roof.
This car was fitted with a manual Hirst transmission, and had chrome bumpers and indicators mounted in the sidelights (like a Mk3 Cortina). It also apparently had mild crash damage to the rear offside wing.
The counterfeit WGU - the red car of unknown registration bought in late 1987 and painted up to look like WGU while wearing its plates and some panels, and which became known as Ford Timelord - was seemingly abandoned as a non-runner at Pinewood Studios after filming was wrapped up for the 3am Eternal video shoot in December 1990/ January 1991.
It later passed to banger racer Paul Bickers through his film industry contacts. Photos show that it was raced with Granada engine and running gear at Swaffham on 30 June 1991, and seems to have been fairly comprehensively wrecked at the event, competing in two heats but breaking down irreparably before the final, with the back end completely collapsed. Paul says that the remains were scrapped soon after.
This car was fitted with a column-mounted automatic gearbox, with black bumpers and round aftermarket indicators mounted in the bumpers. It also seems to have had a repair panel fitted around the offside headlights.
The Jon Mace pictures are fantastic documents of the last days of Ford Timelord, but all evidence seems to suggest that they couldn't have been taken in November 1991, as he reckons - pics taken at the Swaffham banger meet in June 1991 confirm that it's definitely the same car, with matching rust holes and cracking sections of filler. So this apparent 'proof' that Timelord was still sitting on Jimmy's drive in late 1991 may simply be a red herring.
BUT - just to further muddy the waters - there appears to have been a flurry of activity regarding this vehicle on the DVLA website, with V5C logbooks issued several times for WGU18G over the past year or two - most recently in March 2022. The registration mark is currently shown as 'SORN' - so does it really still exist, or is someone just trying to acquire the numberplate?]
With the next K Foundation 'event' rumoured to occur in 2023, maybe the world has not quite seen the last of Ford Timelord? As we all know, Timelords don't die, they just regenerate...
Mega thanks to all the many, many AS users who have contributed to this post over the years - plus the efforts made by Darren at the HuntTimelord blog to collect together any and all details about this singular vehicle (or, indeed, vehicles).
Yes, very interesting. I spent a couple of years part time minicabbing in the early 90's but as a poorly paid employed driver. (made more in tips than got paid) Our steeds were 2.3 diesel sierras. reliable and economical but so bloody slow!!
I never ceased to be amazed at how taxis would wear out in ways "private" cars would not. I briefly owned a 1982 Granada 2.0 ex-newport taxi. The ignition lock was so worn a house key would start it. The steering wheel covering was worn away exposing the foam and metal core. I had to replace the entire interior, the stink of sick, beer,fags and B.O would have made a seagull retch. Incredibly I still saw it being driven around 2 years after I sold it.
Bloody hell. I had one of these years ago, I reckon your Perkins engine was pretty tired if it could only muster 80mph. I put a turbo diesel out of a montego in mine and it went like stink (relatively), but I can see you have the power situation well in hand. Torque steer much?
I thought I should update this, alot has happened! MOT was passed first time, I couldnt believe it, almost fainted. Few minor advisories, front tyre worn, small hole in sump and load sensing valve stiff, I've sorted 2 of them already.. I was just driving it about apart from that, enjoying it, butttt I'll admit I was getting bored I'll admit, I'm a bit of a yob, and the 50hp of the mighty perkins wasnt cutting it, so I have put the Type R engine I've had sat around in. I grossly underestimated how much work it was going to be and it isnt actually finished yet, need to sort the front suspension and make up the cooling system but its going to be very fun motor when done.
I know a few people with preserved wagons..as long as you start with something that's not already cream crackered and you can work on them yourself they need not be that dear to keep on the road. None of them buy new tyres, if a truck is not working for a living the tyres will outlive you and just perish over the years, so part worns is the way to go. A solo tractor unit is quite capable of returning 15 mpg or more depending on engine and how its driven. some of the smaller gardners are good for 20 mpg. With ERFs, although the cab skin won't rust (fibreglass) the steel frame inside certainly will, Parts can still be bought if you know where to look, as ERF used a lot of the same components of USA trucks in the '70s and 80's The E14 cummins engine was one of the first advertised as a "million miler" so longevity not normally a problem. If I had the space and a more understanding wife I would love a Ford Transcon or detroit powered Bedford TM
I make this comparison in work quite a lot to a guy who has a 1 series and he really,really doesn't like it. I even park my allegro next to his car so everyone else can see. Hahahaha!
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