Musicians have always had a thing for Rolls-Royces, but these days, it may be the other way around, as the car manufacturer recently teamed up with Skepta to promote its brand-new Phantom VIII with an online video featuring the artist recording inside the vehicle.
- UPDATE: Rolls-Royce pulled the original clip after social media critics pointed out that Skepta was not wearing a seat belt.
Throughout the clip, Skepta and a pal are chauffeured through the Swiss Alps, making music on a MacBook and rapping through a Sennheiser mic along the way. That may be as in-depth as the recording part of the clip gets, but hey, nice work if you can get it. To be fair, Rolls-Royces are famously quiet cars, so the clip may illustrate how silent it is inside a Phantom VIII (not that I’d know—I’ve never been inside one, but Rolls-Royce is welcome to lend me one to test. I’ll need it for a year or two, just to be certain).
Skepta isn’t the first musician to dig Rolls-Royces; likely the most famous music-related Rolls is John Lennon’s psychedelic 1967 Phantom V. The gaudy car outraged many in the moneyed classes at the time, yet today the vehicle now lives in Canada’s Royal B.C. Museum.
Likewise, Skepta isn’t the first musician to record in a car either, as there’s been numerous examples over the years. Back in 2014, Chevy teamed with Detroit band The Gentlemen Mutineers to record “Detroit Throttle” in a 2014 Impala in order to show off the car’s quiet interior.
However, my favorite example of car-based recording goes back to 1996—long before the days of DAWs on laptops and Garageband on your iPhone—when roots rocker Ben Vaughn created an entire album while sitting in his 1965 Rambler American.
The appropriately titled Rambler 65 album spawned both an ultra low-budget mockumentary (excerpt above) and one of the funniest assignments I’ve ever covered, which you can find here.
