The Ford Timelord project gathers pace once again with a great exclusive contribution/insight from Jimmy Cauty
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu 🚔🚔📡!!
Early 1987
In Early 1987 The JAMs would go about their business on a 1975 triumph bonneville T140V café racer, now this bike was fine but when Bill was on the back it became top heavy and very difficult to stop in a hurry, something had to be done.
I saw the police car advertised in Auto Trader or maybe it was Exchange and Mart,
the ad said Ford Galaxy 500 police car as used in Superman the movie, It was for sale somewhere in South East London, we jumped into Simons pick up truck and headed over to take a look.
The owner of the car was a bloke called Flinton Chalk, Flinton would pop up from time to time over the next few decades most recently as a member of Badger Kull.
One of his main selling points for the car apart from it being in the film Superman was that the car had a 3 speed manual hirst gear shift, I didn’t know what that was but apparently it was a thing racing cars have so was a good thing.
The ford was in pretty bad condition but in those days we just bought old bangers and drove them into the ground, but it was a runner so I did the deal and drove it home
I think it was £300.
The first thing I did was sand off the sheriff’s stars from the front doors
and replaced them with The JAMs PD Blaster logo which I painted by hand with blackboard paint and a small brush, I then painted the 23 on the roof and KLF on the hood and rear trunk, I also fitted a whip areal to the back wing, and for the roof I fitted a rotating beacon light and borrowed a couple of spotlights from a JCB that was parked on a nearby building site.
( in those days building sites were not protected by fencing and cctv so it was much easier to acquire the things you needed for your cop car )
Pretty soon we were using it as the JAMs mobile, it was also my everyday car.
Driving a Ford Galaxy 500 was a bit of a trial, the inside was usually full of choking exhaust fumes but because we all smoked anyway no one noticed, the breaks didn’t work, the suspension was shot to bits, the electrics were rotten, the steering had so much play I always described it as like trying to steer a small boat around town. In the early 70-80s and early 90s we were quite skint as the royalties hadn’t started coming in for KLF records, I did have some royalties from the Lord of the Rings poster but they were diminishing by the late 80s, everything was done self-help, from doing up our squats to fixing cars and motorbikes, the idea of taking a car to a garage to be fixed was unheard of, that was the sort of thing your parents would do.
The down side of this was that most cars we had were total wrecks and our houses were even worse, this didn’t bother us one bit, we felt like we were living in a new type of community and it was exiting even though a bit harsh in the winters.
At some point in 1987 we had to drive to Stockholm in the Police car to try and have a meeting with Abba.
We got there okay but I noticed when checking the oil level that water was mixing with the oil, (the oil looked like white emulsion paint) I knew that was bad news but we set off anyway back to London and hoped for the best, later that night somewhere on a forest road North of Gothenburg the engine blew, there was a huge bang and that was it, no compression and a great big puddle of oil and water all over the road.
Bill was a fully payed up member of the AA so the car was eventually towed back to London with us all in the crew cab of the AA truck.
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.
While driving this new car back to Trancentral I pulled into a garage on the Old Kent Road to get some gas, this Ford had automatic transmission which I was not used to, the battery was flat so I left the engine running while I filled up the tank, without realising I had left the gear shift in reverse instead of park and at some point during the re-fueling the engine revved and the car took off in reverse at full speed, the door which was open smashed off on a petrol pump, there was petrol everywhere, all I could do was watch as the car sped out of the forecourt in reverse onto the main road, it looked like things were going to get very messy but just at that point My brother Simon who was following came driving past in his pick up truck, the police car smashed into him, all was saved, no one was killed, it was a small miracle.
( note: this was quite normal behaviour in the 1980s ) I put the smashed door in the trunk, left my name and address with the garage owner and continued our journey back to Trancentral.
( Note: I never heard back from the garage or the police about the smashed petrol pump and dangerous driving while not actually in the car )
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.
It was this second car that in 1989 becameFordTimelord and went toSpain to film the road movieTheWhiteRoom.
NOTE:Technically a number plate should not be taken from one car andattached to another but thiswas ashow bizemergencyso it was ok.
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.
We replaced it with a mini clubman which cost £25, this car would literally fill up with water when in rained and had only one functioning brake, it was this mini that we used to drive to Wiltshire in the middle of the night to start our crop circling career.
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.
I’m not sure what happened to the car after that shoot, 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.
There was a third police car an early 80s Ford Custom V8, but we never used it as a JAMs car and sold it.
In 1992 we took part in a banger race pop stars v. Radio 1 DJs at Wimbledon race track this was a different police car, a later model with a V8 engine that I painted to look like the original,that car was completely smashed to bits that night and left at the race track.
Jimmy Cauty
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu
A Big thanks to Jimmy Cauty for his quality contribution to the Ford Timelord blog.
Still traveling through time and dimensions gathering everything and anything Ford Timelord,
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