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Rolls-Royce will be celebrating the 50th anniversary year of The Beatles legendary album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in its own way by bringing the colourful Rolls-Royce Phantom V, famous for being owned by John Lennon, back home to London.
Currently owned by the Royal British Columbia Museum in Canada, the car will join ‘The Great Eight Phantoms – A Rolls-Royce Exhibition’ at Bonhams on Bond Street, an area visited regularly by Lennon in the late 1960s in this very car.
British expats returning home for the summer as well as holidaymaking Bahrainis can join members of the public to see ‘The John Lennon Phantom V’ in all its glory from July 29 to the August 2.
On 3 June 1965 – the same day that Edward H White left the capsule of his Gemini 4 to become the first American to walk in space –Lennon took delivery of something rather special. It was a Rolls-Royce Phantom V in Valentine Black. He would later say that he always wanted to be an eccentric millionaire, and the Phantom would become an important step towards that dream.
Lennon had the Phantom V customised in true rock-star style. The rear seat was converted to a double bed, a television, telephone and refrigerator were installed, along with a ‘floating’ record player and a custom sound system, which included an external loud hailer.
Then, in April 1967, just as the recording of the game-changing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was finishing, Lennon asked Surrey coachbuilders, JP Fallon, to give the Phantom a new paint job. The freshly-painted Phantom was unveiled days before the worldwide release of Sgt. Pepper’s and it seemed part of the overall concept of the album.
The new colour scheme is often described as ‘psychedelic’ and certainly the colours, particularly the dominant yellow, reflected the cover of the album. But look carefully and you will see it is no random swirl, but a floral Romany scroll design, as used on gypsy caravans and canal barges, with a zodiac symbol on the roof.
The Phantom V was used regularly by Lennon until 1969. Having used it, pre-paint change, to collect his MBE with his bandmates in 1965, he then used it again in 1969 to return his MBE to Buckingham Palace, in protest against, among other things, the Vietnam War.
The car was shipped to the US in 1970 when Lennon moved there and was loaned out to ferry other rock stars around such as The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and The Moody Blues. The Beatles, however, remain to this day the most commercially successful and musically influential band in the history of popular music.
In 1977, after a period in storage, it was donated by billionaire Jim Pattison to the Canadian museum.
Lennon, one of the four-piece group’s founders, was murdered in 1980. Lone gunman Mark Chapman shot him in the back four times as he and his wife, Ono, returned to their Manhattan apartment from a recording studio.
