What Would Keith Moon Do? Rolls-Royce Dunks a Phantom in the Pool
Re-creating the legendary story about The Who’s late drummer that might even be true, Rolls-Royce helps celebrate the Phantom’s 100th birthday by dropping one in a swimming pool.
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Rolls-Royce
As part of the nameplate’s 100th anniversary, Rolls-Royce has taken a Phantom Extended swimming.
Its a re-creation of a famous, if possibly apocryphal, story about The Who drummer Keith Moon.
The Phantom has long been a backdrop to icons of popular music.
Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, Rolls-Royce’s Phantom is the defining nameplate of the marque. By way of celebration, the company has planned appearances at important automotive events, specially commissioned vehicles, celebrations of brand heritage—and a spot of Phantom summer bathing. Yes, that’s a Rolls-Royce in a pool you’re seeing.
Lifetime Achievement
Celebrating 100 Years of the Rolls-Royce Phantom
This performance piece isn’t intended to show how the Phantom’s build quality features watertight panel gaps or invoke comparisons to a sort of roadgoing Queen Mary II luxury liner. Instead, it’s a re-creation of one of the most popular stories of rock-n’-roll excess, a story that might never have actually happened.
Still a good myth doesn’t need to been true to sound right. As the story goes, in 1971, The Who drummer Keith Moon drove his Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool in Flint, Michigan, as a way of livening up a party. It’s exactly the sort of thing you could believe about the hard-partying Moon, who was the epitome of hard-rocking bad behavior and was known to test the water-resistance of a hotel TV or two while on tour.
It’s a good story, and quibbling about whether or not it was actually a Lincoln or just something Moon made up to get a rise out of a reporter needn’t get in the way of the re-telling. Here, Rolls-Royce used an extended-body-shell car that was bound for the scrapyard anyway, partially submerging it in the outdoor pool at Tinside Lido in Plymouth, U.K.
Rolls-Royce
Rolls-Royce
Tinside has a bit of Beatles history to it, having appeared in a photo from the era when they were filming The Magical Mystery Tour. Famously, during that same year of 1967, John Lennon released his psychedelic yellow Phantom, all painted up like a Romany traveling wagon. That particular Phantom did not do any bathing, although had it done so, perhaps it would have qualified as a yellow submarine.
Matt Green|Getty Images
The Who’s late drummer Keith Moon with his car collection in 1972.
With its Art Deco–themed design and fountains, Tinside Lido is elegant enough for a Rolls-Royce photo shoot, but there’s something sardonically working-class about the name. “Lido” is Italian for beach, and one of the original London public swimming pools picked up the nickname as a sort of tongue-in-cheek contrast between what ordinary city dwellers had access to and the glamour of the Riviera. Soon enough, every outdoor pool was called a lido.
Rolls-Royce
But certainly few of them have a Phantom doing the breaststroke. Rolls-Royce is using this stunt to highlight the Phantom’s long association with popular music, from Sir Elton John to modern hip-hop, both wealthy elegance and riotous excess. Here’s hoping someone remembered to back an extra-large high-thread-count towel.
Rolls-Royce
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Brendan McAleer
Contributing Editor
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels.
