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AA : Firstly a big thank you for allowing us to share your photo collection. RP : The pleasure is all mine. It’s great to know that people are still interested in seeing the old photos that have been languishing in my loft for the last 30 years. AA : Now a lot of visitors will be very familiar with Custom Car, but can you tell us a bit about the magazine’s beginning, you were there at the start? RP : I studied photography at Croydon College of Art and then joined the Photographic Department of Link House Magazines (Custom Car’s original parent company) as a photographic assistant in early 1968. I started out doing all the black and white processing and printing but by the time Custom Car was launched I had progressed to being a photographer and got involved with the new magazine straight away. I shot the cover for the September 1969 dummy issue, which was put out to the trade to gauge reaction and bring in advertising for the first issue. AA : That must seem such a long time ago now. RP : Yes it does, but basically I’m still at the same place! I stayed with the company through several changes of ownership and I now work for IPC Media Ltd - which itself is part of Time Warner. I’m now the Chief Photographer and manage a staff of 5 photographers. Custom Car of course got sold to its new owners back in the 1990s. AA : You must have fond memories of working on Custom Car and with all the editorial staff that passed through? RP : I’m still in touch with Trevor Ridgers, the original Art Editor, and I’m godfather to one of his daughters. I still work with Anthony Butler and until recently Norman Hodson who also took photographs for Custom Car in the old days. And one time editor Colin Gamm stayed with Link House long enough to become a director before the IPC take-over. AA : And even if CC is now in different hands, I gather the magazine’s close involvement with drag racing was no coincidence. RP : Well the original idea was to produce a purely drag racing magazine. Mike Lintern was working at Link House on one of their other titles, Caravan Magazine, but was always keen on drag racing (Mike was in fact one of the early pioneers of the British Hot Rod Association). He went to the management with the idea of producing a drag racing magazine, but Link House decided to broaden it out to include other automotive subjects and chose a guy called Ian Speller to run things (he can be seen on the left of the dummy issue cover). Unfortunately Ian died in a car accident before the first issue was published and so Mike Hill, who’d been editor of one of our boat magazines, was put in charge. In fact Mike Hill and his secretary Mary appeared on the cover of the first issue (March 1970). I think this cover aptly summed up the British customising and drag racing scene – a California-style beach buggy photographed in the English rain! Mike Lintern went on to write most of the drag racing features in CC while still working on Caravan Magazine, but eventually left to start his own business - American Automotive. AA : Did you know anything about drag racing before you worked on Custom Car? RP : No, I knew nothing about drag racing and I think my first brush with a dragster was a visit to Fibre Glass Repairs in Bromley to photograph the Phelps’ Gloworm Capri. My first visit to Santa Pod was around the same time and I got hooked straight away and continued to cover most of the major meetings for the next few years. AA : Of course you also went to the States in those early years. That must’ve been a big deal back then, when foreign travel was not the cheap low-cost business it is today? RP : Yes, I went to the USA a couple of times in the ‘70s but my first trip in 1971 will always be the most memorable. Dick Lawrence (of “Dick’s Place”) arranged the trip and we made a strange group of travellers. There was Mike Lintern and his business partner Ray Hart, then there was Bob Phelps and Farmer Ernie Braddick (then owners of Santa Pod), also Eileen Catley, Phil Stentiford (a drag bike racer), Lynda Lawrence and Gill Crispin - and me! It was actually a holiday, but I met up with Mike Hill who’d flown out separately and Mike and I did several American features that later ended up in Custom Car. I also covered the ’71 Supernationals, and a couple of meets at Lions and Orange County, and then went on to Florida to visit Don Garlits with Mike Lintern. AA : Sounds like Nirvana! RP : Yes, the sight and sound of 32 Funny Cars battling it out at an Orange County night meet was absolutely fantastic, but it made it hard to sustain the enthusiasm when waiting to see if a couple of Top Fuel cars would make a run on a wet weekend at Santa Pod. AA : And so you exchanged all that for shooting dragsters and street rods in a warm studio with a couple of nude models. RP : I can’t remember exactly why my visits to Santa Pod tailed off, but it may have had as much to do with not being paid for weekend work, as it had to do with the disillusionment I’ve just mentioned. However, CC kept me very busy in other areas including the studio sessions with the girls. In many ways CC was the forerunner of today’s lads mags and had a bunch of very imaginative and creative people working on it. In particular I would have to pick out journalists Mike Hill and Colin Gamm, and artists Trevor Ridgers and Julian Basten (who unfortunately succumbed to cancer many years ago). Imagination ran riot, and fun was always a high priority in those early photo sessions. Like the February ’71 Mini Moke feature with Julian, Colin and Trevor doing their ‘speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil’ bit dressed as choirboys in front of Chaldon Church - don’t ask me why! Likewise, the June ’71 Yak feature with Mike, Julian and Andy Anderson complete with ack-ack gun doing ‘Dad’s Army’ outside an Air Training Corps building in central Croydon. Talking about CC’s home town, how could I forget the East Croydon Safari Rally, with shocked residents watching a bunch of lunatics dressed in animal suits leaping all over a Fiat 128. The same issue had Tony Dickson’s ‘Money Hungry’ Camaro on the cover doing a fire burnout, and included a very alcoholic and bizarre visit to drummer Keith Moon’s Weybridge home to check out his automotive collection. I could go on like this for hours and I haven’t even talked about those girly sessions yet, but I can assure you that they were definitely all work and no play! AA : Now I’m sure some of our readers would like to know about what cameras you had back then and also what you use today. RP : Well back in the '70s I couldn’t afford much in the way of personal equipment, so for example, the gear I took to the States was a Pentax S1a and a 6x6 Mamiyaflex C2 twin lens camera for the medium format stuff. But when I was using Link House equipment it was all Nikons and Hasselblads. Today the Photographic Department is entirely digital, I oversaw the changeover in August 2003 and we haven’t used a roll of film since. I think it's a great way to work, especially in the studio where we shoot direct from our Canon 1Ds cameras to our laptops via firewire, enabling us to immediately view the image full screen. When we've finished the job, it goes straight through the network to the magazine's Art Editor who can start work on it straight away. Brilliant! I only do occasional car work these days for the likes of Volksworld and MiniWorld, but most of my time is spent in the studio shooting for magazines like Hi-Fi News and Guitar. Mind you, I continued with the girly shoots for Superbike until recently, but after 30 years of those sessions think I’m finally past it! AA : I know what we have here is from your personal collection, any idea what happened to the old Custom Car archive of photos? RP : The CC archive would have left the company along with the magazine - but goodness knows what happened to them then. I gather the old filing cabinets disappeared somewhere during the move, maybe they were just dumped. If anyone out there knows what happened or where the remains of the archive went I’d love to hear… AA : So would we! Maybe someone will get in touch via the website. RP : That’d be great, but meanwhile I hope everyone enjoys what we can show. AA : They will, we have no doubts about that.
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Since early word reached some of our regular contributors and visitors that Roger Phillips was joining The Acceleration Archive, the sense of excitement and anticipation has been almost tangible. So it is with great pleasure that we can now introduce our latest collection
to this website. For those too young to remember, Roger was Custom Car’s in-house photographer and his name was synonymous with capturing all the cars and all the races for our monthly dose of quarter mile action back in the early 1970s. Custom Car’s mission from its very outset was to bring us regular features on this then-new motorsport and the familiar yellow Wynns-jacketed figure of Roger Phillips down on the start line always seemed to add a heightened expectation of a good race to come. Roger’s
time at the strip might have been short in tenure but the wealth and quality of his photography will give us an immense collection to enjoy and savour for a long time to come. With Custom Car’s current quarter mile journalist and photographer, Mark Gredzinski already a regular contributor to The Acceleration Archive, we feel very privileged to now add Roger Phillips’ name to our list of galleries.)
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