Cars

Roy Wood

OK, as someone who now drives a little Citroen C1 citybug and having never owned anything remotely exotic in the past - and - as someone who would gladly trade in for an electric ride, I still maintain an unhealthy interest in The Automobile. It's a curious thing. Even though I stopped rock-climbing years ago, I can still pick up a copy of Climber or whatever is the current journal and vicariously inhabit moves I've never been actually capable of making on the rock. I suspect that in most things, that is the case for all of us. We are interested in stuff just for the sake of being interested in it - a pretty normal, human trait.
    So, I still pick up magazines from the shop/garage/supermarket or whatever, that focus on things I either simply cannot afford or cannot personally achieve - that's what drives the magazine industry: curiosity and wishful-thinking. But for the most part, it's merely being interested in stuff that we aren't directly involved with.
    Now, the presence of Mr. Wood as the illustration for this post might seem perverse, but I'll get there. Two things prompted this. I picked up a copy of Octane magazine today at lunchtime - cars. Exotic cars. And then Steve Smith phoned me this evening. Random? Maybe not. There's cosmic forces at work here. Steve and I talked about politics, COVID-19, the Axis of Evil and retirement - my impending and his continuing. Mentioned at some point was a certain Mr. C.B. Hill. Now, I haven't spoken to Clive for many a long year, but we do go back a long way - as do we all, I might add. But there were two pieces in Octane that resonated with me about my shared histories with both Steve and Clive.
    First off - Steve used to drive a Vauxhall Viva, many, many moons ago. After our conversation earlier, I found a piece in the magazine about the Chevrolet Firenza Can-Am: a GM South Africa homologation special based on the same platform as Steve's Viva. Except that it had a rather larger motor under the bonnet - a 5-litre Chevy to be exact. Made me think. Would we have even made it to our thirtieth birthdays if that had been the ride then? Mmmm...
    Secondly, Mr. Hill and Roy Wood. Almost fifty years ago, Clive and I went to have afternoon tea with said Roy Wood, then of ELO, previously of The Move and later of Wizzard. We got the invite courtesy of a nephew of Roy's, whose name still escapes me. Mr. and Mrs. Wood were very nice and we had tea and biscuits in their nice home in Little Aston, Birmingham; with a white carpet that must have been two inches thick, a large Dulux dog and very trendy white TV to match.
    The memorable bit though, was after tea in Roy's attic studio. I seem to remember a full Marshall stack being there, but there were two other things that stay with me to this day. The first was getting to play Roy's Gibson acoustic guitar - something so far out of my sphere it was unreal, but most of all, it was listening to a rough studio mix of '10538 Overture' from the first Electric Light Orchestra album and actually handling the original sheet music for it - for a teenage kid it was absolute magic. What about the car connection, though?
    Well, another piece in the copy of Octane was about the Jensen Interceptor, which just happened to be the car Roy Wood was driving at the time (I don't think it was the FF - could be wrong, though). He gave the three of us a lift back into town after, the nephew in the front and me and Clive squeezed into the plus-two seat at the back. There you go.