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The most famous Rolls Royce in the world: John Lennon and his psychedelic Phantom V

Wed 11 January 2023 16:56, UK

“Imagine no possessions”, John Lennon once sang, but there was one prized material item that proved particularly close to his heart. A Rolls Royce is already considered the pinnacle of road-going luxury, and when you delve into the winged brand, you find that a Phantom V is the pièce de résistance of motoring opulence. Only 517 of these smooth-rolling machines were ever made. Lennon committed what many petrolheads deem sacrilege when he pimped his elusive ride into the equivalent of a moving LSD tab. But Lennon is Lennon, and of those 517 Phantom Vs only one has a truly iconic place in history and the column inches to prove it.

The mammoth vehicle was hardly subtle in the first place. It weighed in at 2.5 tonnes. With a 3.6-metre wheelbase and a 6.2L V8 engine roaring under the hood, the Phantom was a car usually reserved for traditional royalty. The British Royal family owned two of them, for the Queen and Queen Mother. Needless to say, Lennon chose a different tact when he purchased one in 1964. The famed ‘Smart’ Beatle chose to adorn his exclusive car with a kaleidoscopic swirl of groovy imagery. Years later, he would have the gall to call out the pressures of press intrusion – imagine the number of eyeballs he pulled towards himself cruising around the Wirral in this souped-up rider.

However, comical contradictions aside, the car is somewhat of an oddity when you consider the legacy of the frontman and what he stood for. Granted, he was only 23 or 24 when he purchased the car at some point in 1964, and his ‘no possessions’ ethos was not fully formed, but it is, nevertheless, a world away from the humility that he would go on to preach. As it happens, possessions were actually at the heart of The Beatles’ early motivations. As Paul McCartney would reveal when he was asked about the supposed anti-materialistic tenets behind the band: “That’s a myth,” he countered in a New Yorker interview, “John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool’.”

Lennon’s Rolls Royce purchase was still clearly during the phase when they were shaking off their working-class roots and grasping at the bounty that was falling in front of them with each new hit. In fact, when Lennon purchased his Mulliner Park Ward Phantom V, the near legally blind Beatle couldn’t even drive, and he wouldn’t pass his test until a year later, in 1965. Despite that, he was happy to shed a reported £11,000 on the vehicle (£178,669 in 2023).

Initially, it was finished in Valentine’s black, which may well be the coolest colour name we’ve come across. Everything was black except for the radiator (though Lennon did ask for the radiator to be black but Rolls point-blank refused), even the wheels. The car then featured some incredible customisations, including black leather upholstery, a cocktail cabinet with fine-wood trim, a writing table, reading lamps, a seven-piece his-and-hers luggage set, and a Perdido portable television.

However, when the ‘Fab Four’ got the ‘60s fully swinging, black fell out of favour – it was as though Lennon hoisted the car’s coolness with his own groovy petard. Around this time, Lennon mused, ‘what good was an expensive, lumbering mammoth, if it wasn’t in keeping with the zeitgeist?’ With that times a-changin’ mindset at the forefront of his thinking, the bespectacled Beatle reportedly submitted a seven-page list of expensive alterations to the garage.

The changes included a backseat that could be converted into a double bed, a Philips Auto-Mignon AG2101 “floating” record player that stopped needless needle jumping, a radio telephone, and a cassette tape deck. Speakers were even mounted in the front wheel wells so that Lennon and whoever he was travelling with could broadcast their passing thoughts to the wider world via a microphone – as if he didn’t have enough sway as it was!

As for the exterior, after using the car in Spain while filming Richard Lester’s How I Won the War, it needed a new paint job, and Lennon was decidedly bored of the all-black look. The Beatle commissioned a private paint job from coach makers J. P. Fallon Ltd. to be decorated like a Romany gypsy wagon—only more shagadelic ‘60s chic. Whether or not he had the famous ‘Furthur’ – the converted school bus that housed beat writers like Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe on their wayward, cultural road trip around the US – in mind is unknown, but it certainly ended up looking like that.

Artist Steve Weaver painted the red, orange, green and blue swirls, gorgeous floral side panels and even a Libra on the roof. It was a clear message that Lennon was not going to be one of the establishment’s playthings; he was his own man. He even went on to buy a second all-white Phantom V to match his ‘white period’ and cruised the streets like a giant gas-guzzling dove. But it’s the psychedelic incarnation that surmises the most iconic legacy.

When the vehicle was shipped to the States in 1969, it became a rock ‘n’ roll plaything. In a symbolic show of Lennon’s burgeoning socialism, he was happy to lend the ride to the likes of Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and The Moody Blues – some say that even sniffer dogs now refuse to approach the seats without hazmat suits on. But pithiness aside, beyond the mile counter, this car says a lot about the journey of pop culture. From its odd place in Lennon’s gnosticism to the colourful era-defining iconography, the car is an edifice of the strange ways of the counterculture revolution.

So where is it now, you ask? In 1977 Lennon donated the famous Phantom V to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum at the Smithsonian Institute to cover a teensy IRS problem. The Cooper-Hewitt Museum then sold the psychedelic car in 1985 for a whopping $2.3 million to a Canadian businessman, and since 1993 it has been in the Royal British Columbia Museum in Canada–still perfuming the area with a whiff of famed herb.