Fantastic work, a pleasure to watch it come together and to see you maintain your patience and care when I'm sure there must be the temptation to rush and finish it off.
You're more than justified in taking a break - it's remarkable how you've stuck at this after doing the same thing throughout your working week.
Made some more progress yesterday. The car now has a working heater system.
Started off making a new foam mat that goes on the bulkhead behind the heater box. It's not very easy to put on due to the shape of the bulkhead but I managed it without any nasty creases.
Next I fitted the bits that hold the bonnet shut. I've also cleaned and fitted the bonnet cable.
Next is the heater box itself which contains the blower motor, hot/cold flap and the matrix itself. These come apart but you have to be careful as the the cases are very brittle.
The matrix in this one has been replaced so I was hopeful that it would be ok. Unfortunately it leaked when I tested it. Not really surprised as it's probably 25 years old.
I went to the company Granada cave and came back with 4 used units that looked serviceable. Cleaned up the first one and it didn't leak so I painted it. These are original units so they have the advantage of being a perfect fit in the heater box. My leaking unit didn't fit properly and would have rattled over bumps. I also tested the blower motor and it sounds fine.
With the box cleaned and the flap re-foamed I put everything back together.
Bit tight getting it into the car but managed to get it there without dislodging any of the foam gaskets to the bulkhead.
That completes progress for 2019. I'm going to leave it over the Christmas break as it's been pretty flat out for the second half of this year. Painting the car was a much bigger task than I'd anticipated and swallowed 200 hours. The refit so far has been quite intense with some of the work being done after work during the week. So far I've spent about 90 hours putting the car back together.
Looking forward to a break. I hope to have the car on the road next year and provided I don't have too many setbacks with the mechanical side of things it's certainly possible.
Merry Christmas!
A quiet year for me on the older cars - Laurel, Sunny, 1200 and Camry all still here.
Laurel and Camry both without MoT at present as time/money has been in short supply. Should be no issue with the Laurel, it'll get sorted ready for next spring. Camry is because I don't know what to do with it, but I think I will take it for a test early next year and that'll force a decision.
Need for the Camry is reduced due to me enjoying the Lexus RX (which is basically a modern Camry on stilts). It's a fine thing to drive and ideal for current winter conditions. I actually bought two RXs this year, but the first one got exchanged for the low mileage, one former owner example I now have due to 'issues'.
Wasn't disappointed to see the back of the 2015 1.8 Avensis estate - I was quite happy with the previous diesel I had, but the petrol was a gutless thing with no character.
Did consider selling the Sunny, still would if I knew it was going to a good home but can't face putting it on the open market. Would like to get another LS400 - the RX is great, but it's not the same as a RWD V8.
The Bo11ox Mazda 929 I was storing here got collected by a guy down south who was going to use it for spares on an RX4 restoration.
Well, that's phenomenal - thanks so much for pulling so many strings to speak to those with a concrete link to the Timelord!
So I think we finally have all the evidence to formulate a definitive answer to Bren's question, a year after it was asked - WGU 18G was indeed raced and subsequently scrapped in June 1991, after a very eventful four years in Jimmy Cauty's ownership.
The race footage indicates that so much bodywork had been hacked/fallen off, that I think we can put to bed any hopes that the remains were squirrelled away somewhere.
The latest pic, from Paul, clearly shows the grille with a square lighting mount attached to it. Combined with the matching door rot previously identified, I'd say it's now beyond question that it's the same car.
As well as the Granada running gear, it appears that there have been extensive repairs to the crumbling rear arches, which now have a completely different profile - as well as lashings of fresh black rattle-can paint.
Interesting that my earlier theory - that Bickers Action were involved in the '3am Eternal' video and hence had been the catalyst in getting the car from Jimmy to Swaffham - also turned out to be unfounded.
Other yank cars owned by the group at different times, wearing mock-police livery along with KLF insignia, seem to have muddied the waters somewhat when it came to digging through the car's history. Even band members themselves seem to consider that there was more than one Ford Timelord.
But for me, the car that appeared on the record covers and in the videos put out by this bizarre guerrilla duo of wilful nonconformists is the one and only Ford Timelord.
So we know it travelled to Sweden, and later drove down to Spain - and back again, one way or another.
It appeared on TV and in print on multiple occasions in the late 1980s, and I really can't think of another group that had a car so closely tied in with their image (other than possibly The Monkeemobile, but I know what I'd rather be seen driving).
Cooler than a cool thing, even if its mortal remains became bean cans nearly 30 years ago, I think we can all agree that WGU will live on forever.
And it appears that this thread has even partially inspired a '66 Galaxie to enter the AS fold - and what could be a better result than that?
It's been a wild ride, kids. I think we're nearly done.
Cheers to all who have contributed, challenged and gone above and beyond in their detective work!
***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).
You may dare...?
Both the doors that were on it, one original, one replacement circa 2006, were both absolutely rotten. The bottoms were full of wob, mesh and glassfibre, that I put there over the years....
The green doors are 100% better than what was there, but they are not perfect, so I didn't think it worth going to the effort of painting, as I will have to do work on the passenger door at some point in the future. I have a brand new drivers door in primer and bubble wrap in a lock-up, so that is not such a concern.
I got the doors from a scrapyard circa 1995, from a 6 month old malta green Panda CLX that had been crashed by a pensioner. I got the boot lid too. I put them on my daily driver at the time and then kept them when that Panda died circa 1998, so they have been in a shed since then...
That's a lovely Christmas story, DC! Looking forward to the photo updates.
This arrived in the post a few weeks back:
I'm a sucker for a nice box design.
Very reminiscent to me of the box that the Corgi Juniors Mini Metro came in, when freshly launched. As I feel is the case with the Corgi MM, will the model inside be not as good as the box?
Personally, I think it's not bad! Slight detail issue in having two different trim levels of wheels but I'll forgive that. Funnily enough, the metallic blue is quite similar to the Corgi Juniors Metro, too.
This is a 1/43 VW Santana, by Conrad, a German firm I wasn't aware of. I bought this not only because I liked it but it looked strikingly similar to....
My Gama Passat! Which turns out to be made by Conrad, despite being boxed as a Gama - shows how observant I am!
Now, I'm a fan of both of these and the quality of the paint in the Santana is most excellent. Somehow though, the flashing remnants and silveriness of the wheels do let the whole show down a smidge - to the point that these look like they look like they could have been bought in some tat shop, adorned with pull back motor and sold in an open cardboard case with white moulded plastic tray. Or perhaps I'm just letting my imagination run away a little, there.
Actually, I take the above comments back, as my critiquing forced me to walk over to the shelf and pick them up again for another look. I've squished all my 'best' 1/43s onto two shelves above the TV and these are parked next to each other in the lower tier, as my arranging has been grade in two ways; upper tier, cream of the crop stuff, service vehicles one side, normal cars opposing. Lower tier, slightly not so good, loosely parked oldest to newest by model, except where colours cause visual displeasure.
Is anyone else as sad I am, when it comes to displaying?!
So then... I went back over to the market at lunchtime, to see if I could pick up some of the Majorettes from Bunglebus' want list...
And, goodness me, if there hadn't been a heavy fall of tat in the interim.
A very heavy fall.
A whole heap of very decent 70s/80s Matchbox, plus an array of early 80s Hot Wheels trucks, had appeared in the 50p box.
They weren't there before.
So I began to claw through the box with frantic abandon, scooping the finds into my hat as I did so; this is why you should always wear a hat, kids.
BUT
It seems that my eagerness had not gone unnoticed.
Within a matter of seconds, two other lads had muscled in either side of me and were also removing diecast as I rummaged through them, in clear breach of Tat Box Etiquette (per Debrett's - "one must always wait for a gentleman to finish his perusal of a tat box, and then moving away by a minimum of half a yard, before subsuming his place. Reaching into a tat box which is already under perusal is considered the height of coarseness").
I tried to prevent myself from squawking, or slapping their paws away, but instead shovelled faster into the hat like some sort of demented Generation Game-esque task - while at the same time idly wondering how my life had come to this.
HOWEVER I did manage to grab a fair amount - though, after bagging and paying, it seems I didn't quite get all I'd hoped.
So there's the Majorettes @bunglebus wanted, plus several he didn't, and then some more Majorette I hadn't clocked the first time around, plus some Lesney era and Universal era Matchbox - and some intriguing early 80s Hot Wheels blackwall articulated trucks.
I haven't yet photographed them all individually.
But then there was also this additional tat panorama:
Right, golly gosh.
All the trucks - mostly Corgi - were priced at £20 each.
Buses, construction vehicles, Batmobile and Karrier Mobile Canteen were out at £10 each.
The other cars were £5 a pop, which seems a little optimistic again, considering the overall two-and-eight of some of them.
The Spot-Ons - upon which mine eyes had alighted before all else - were £15 each.
I really liked the Minor, but someone else had plainly got to it first - the repaint was an odd satin effect, while the base had clearly been drilled already.
With broken bumpers and lights, these were firmly in the restoration category - but I was tempted, indeed.
Interesting that the Fiat's baseplate says 'Tri-ang Models by Spot-On' while the Minor says 'Spot-On Models by Tri-ang'.
Also, the Minor is stamped 'Made in Northern Ireland', which I find kinda nice.
If they'd been un-messed with, then maybe - but as it was, I left them.
Yup, regretting it already - but I guess you can't buy 'em all.
There was also a Matchbox Superkings Rolamatic-effect hovercraft, which was dusty but appeared to be complete and working.
And oh look - it's that Polistil VW Beetle that I didn't buy in 1987, as recently mentioned - though a bit knackered-looking also, with missing bumpers.
I think the prices are a bit optimistic, but here's the thing - they do seem to sell.
Some stuff comes back week after week, but not much.
And, as I know too well, oftentimes I head back over three hours later on a tat-hunt, only to find the objects are all gone.
It's frustrating - but then maybe if he were cheaper, it'd' all be gone by 8am and I wouldn't get a look in.
So there we have it - a bit of a bonus, and some decent things in the blue bag.
Full writeup to follow on those - but probably be Monday before I do!
A project on the house has, as usual, snowballed into something slightly bigger and the need to fit new* carpet into the spare room means I've got to pack up all the display cases.
State of play before being dismantled:
As the display cases are apart I want to get some extra glass shelves made to put in there - more room is needed!
I have created my own tat boxes to pick through when it goes back together again.
Had this oddity since new, bought at a toy shop in Aylesbury I believe. When I got it I was disappointed to see they'd put the glass in back to front, but I never attempted to rectify it:
*When I say new carpet, this being AS I mean remove the current carpet that is four pieces of crudely fitted remnant leftover from our previous house, and replace it with a piece of the old living room carpet we replaced 2-3 years ago.
Recall us exhuming this 2 stroke last Spring, and dragging it back from the West Country?
well, today this happened- finally.
As you can see, we missed a couple of minor items, but we rebuilt the whole damn front end, that had seized solid. Everything - brakes, suspension, steering etc
Anyway, it’s back road legal- first time since 1995, Do I use it through winter, or wait till Spring?
On to the 4 stroke Wartie next- have a nice Scirocco transplant awaiting!
Tangential update. So, last week the 'other' Palladium came up for sale at an auction so we went down, took lots of measurements and photos and stuff to help with some day building an interior for our one. There are lots of differences between the two cars - the green one has an internal hand brake and a right-hand gear change, slightly different engine, totally different rear axle and lots of minor detail differences. It was looking very down at heel and hasn't been driven for a decade at least, so I wasnt surprised that it didn't meet its quite high estimate on the day. Found out later that an acquaintance of mine had bought it post-sale for less than his high bid, which is nice. He's only had it a few days and has already got it running and has been out for his first drive. There's already been a lot of email note comparing, and it's nice to finally open up an exchange of information with the only other person out there in a similar position to me. We hope the two cars will be together at some events in 2020, which will certainly be the first time two Palladiums have been together probably since WW2. Our car is tentatively booked in to have the bodywork finished and painted in January, which is exciting.
Here's something that I'd not consciously seen for decades before encountering it in a charity shop today.
If my mind is less addled than I think it is, I once had a set like this but containing a Honda Accord and a sailing boat on a trailer. Would have been the late 80s that I got it; I rapidly developed a major crush on the Honda and it became my main plaything on The Mound at school (a big grassy edifice at one end of the playing field, with ruts and hollows that, to an eight-year old's imagination, resembled a hilly network of roads and tracks).
Thing is, though, this still-sealed package seems in such astounding condition that I can only just believe that it really is new old stock and not some more recent reissue.
Have I genuinely stumbled upon an untouched thirty-year old relic?
And, as also alluded to on Friday - I'd managed to get my mitts on some stuff in the morning too, but didn't get any pics and had to leave them under my desk to avoid being that guy with a carrier bag of diecast at the work do...
First off:
Yup, the Eastern Scottish Y-Type, which I speculatively picked up since it looked nice (I'm a sucker for Alexander-bodied single deckers, as this is vaguely reminiscent of most of the Ulsterbus fleet when I was growing up).
Nice detailing on this one: I owned a few EFE buses and coaches dating from the mid-90s, and the plasticky look of the wheels kinda put me off. Not this one though, it's ace.
I'd have been happy enough to retain this one as it's such a nice wee thing - but it's now off on a journey to @cms206, so effectively a homecoming of sorts.
Then there was this:
Corgi's rival brand to EFE, the Original Omnibus Co, produced this rather nice Plaxton Panorama I on an AEC Reliance chassis.
Detailing is pretty good; annoying that I couldn't secure the Panorama Elite on the Bedford VAL chassis to enable a comparison shootout for @RoadworkUK. However - you've first dibs on this one, if you still fancy it.
Then it gets a bit strange.
It's not really a secret that I have a weird craving for a Bedford RLHZ, the mobile pump better known as the Green Goddess - a Cold War civil defence vehicle which was kept on front-line readiness until the early 2000s.
I have a Northern Ireland version of an RLHZ also made by Oxford, so this is a rendering of the most common 1960s AFS version.
While not really a fire engine - it's a mobile pump designed to form a part of a chain to relay water to a nuclear-devastated city - nor a military vehicle, the use of the Green Goddesses by army personnel during the firefighters' strikes of the 1970s made them appear to be both things in the public consciousness.
AWD and with a straight-8 Bedford engine, these are hardly economical on fuel, nor are they particularly sturdy since they were largely built using plywood and felt... yet I still kinda want one, for unknown reasons.
This'll do me for now, though.
While looking at the Bedford though, I also saw this...
An AEC Mercury turntable ladder in London Fire Brigade trim, albeit with the front of the cab not properly secured and moving up and down. I'll have to have a look at that.
To be honest, fire engines (and commercials in general) aren't really my bag - while I've a passing interest, they're not something I'd go out of my way to collect.
But that extendable ladder is pretty impressive. 100 scale feet.
This is still a current model in the Oxford Diecasts range - for £20 more than I paid for it...
And lastly:
This horror.
The weird powdery bloom on the packaging and on the model itself gave me a clue that superglue had been used in lavish quantities here, and there were clearly components missing (like wingmirrors and one of the blue roof mounted lights - but as a limited edition of 3,000, surely for £3 this would be worth a punt?
Hmmm.
The turntable was indeed completely disconnected. I found a drift pin in the box along with sundry other busted parts, and also the teeny-tiny red end cap. I then promptly dropped the teeny-tiny end cap, losing it forever.
I genuinely don't know what the fuck has befallen this truck, other than a very cack-handed previous owner.
First, look at the ladder mount:
Yep, the red mount has been superglued on to the silver ladders at an angle of about 10 degrees squint. Why?
And it gets stranger. Ignore the single bleary headlight, and just look at the stance:
Erm…
Okay, so it appears that at some point the entire front axle and steering components, plus most of the leaf-spring suspension, has been broken off.
But it's then been glued back on the wrong way round, and at another jaunty little angle. So the axle is running off, while it also sits much higher on one side - as one suspension mount has been bonded on top of another.
Huh. Right.
There's also a huge blob of glue down at the end of the ladders, for no good reason.
It's a real pity, as this really is a fantastically detailed model with many working parts, and I daresay it wasn't cheap when new.
I refitted the broken ladder mount back on the turntable...
And reinstalled the ladder as best I could, then shoved all the broken-off bits into a hunk of Blu-Tac to stop them going walkies again.
This little gluebomb might give someone hours of pleasure in the restoration, but as the song has it…
So! That's about it for the belated tat round-up; if anyone wants the Opel Blitz or AEC Mercury turntable ladders, do sing up and I'll pop them aside for you.
Oh, and I found this in Home Bargains on Saturday:
Not bad for £1.49.
Going to try the thinners trick on this one to see if I can get the blister off without tearing the card (it's already creased, so I'm not bothered if I make a muck of it).
So there we go.
Til next week, tat fans!
Right, after much faffing, I have scanned the 1978 Guisval postage stamp catalogue
Guisval 1978 01 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 02 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 03 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 04 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 05 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 06 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 07 (2) by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 08 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 09 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 10 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 11 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 12 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 13 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 14 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 15 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 16 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 17 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 18 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 19 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 20 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 21 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 22 by RS, on Flickr
Guisval 1978 23 by RS, on Flickr
Needless to say there are loads here I'd love to get my mitts on, any ex-pat shiters that can nose around the flea markets or import eBay buys without extortionate postage fees?
"Looks fucked m8"
Shush,smoll Eddie!
A coat of paint,some new wheels and a few other bits n pieces later we have this.
"Needs new stickers M8"
I've some on order smoll Eddy.
Even though I managed to get the paint from the old ones that were on there,they were just too battered to use.
A project on the house has, as usual, snowballed into something slightly bigger and the need to fit new* carpet into the spare room means I've got to pack up all the display cases.
State of play before being dismantled:
As the display cases are apart I want to get some extra glass shelves made to put in there - more room is needed!
I have created my own tat boxes to pick through when it goes back together again.
Had this oddity since new, bought at a toy shop in Aylesbury I believe. When I got it I was disappointed to see they'd put the glass in back to front, but I never attempted to rectify it:
*When I say new carpet, this being AS I mean remove the current carpet that is four pieces of crudely fitted remnant leftover from our previous house, and replace it with a piece of the old living room carpet we replaced 2-3 years ago.
A project on the house has, as usual, snowballed into something slightly bigger and the need to fit new* carpet into the spare room means I've got to pack up all the display cases.
State of play before being dismantled:
As the display cases are apart I want to get some extra glass shelves made to put in there - more room is needed!
I have created my own tat boxes to pick through when it goes back together again.
Had this oddity since new, bought at a toy shop in Aylesbury I believe. When I got it I was disappointed to see they'd put the glass in back to front, but I never attempted to rectify it:
*When I say new carpet, this being AS I mean remove the current carpet that is four pieces of crudely fitted remnant leftover from our previous house, and replace it with a piece of the old living room carpet we replaced 2-3 years ago.
A project on the house has, as usual, snowballed into something slightly bigger and the need to fit new* carpet into the spare room means I've got to pack up all the display cases.
State of play before being dismantled:
As the display cases are apart I want to get some extra glass shelves made to put in there - more room is needed!
I have created my own tat boxes to pick through when it goes back together again.
Had this oddity since new, bought at a toy shop in Aylesbury I believe. When I got it I was disappointed to see they'd put the glass in back to front, but I never attempted to rectify it:
*When I say new carpet, this being AS I mean remove the current carpet that is four pieces of crudely fitted remnant leftover from our previous house, and replace it with a piece of the old living room carpet we replaced 2-3 years ago.
Spottedlaurel got a reaction from timolloyd in 1975 Ford Granada Coupe - Lots & lots of tinkering
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