I’LL CALL YOU JAGUAR IF I MAY BE SO BOLD [476]

Creativity doesn’t have to make sense to you personally, even in advertising. Far be it from me to defend the decisions of a multi-national car manufacturer, but belittling creativity is something I will not have.

On Tuesday 19^th November, Jaguar Cars unveiled a thirty-second advertisement featuring a group of colourfully-dressed individuals arrive on an equally colourful, but rocky landscape. They look around, then look at you. One paints lines with a paintbrush, and another brandishes a sledgehammer. Two-word slogans fill the screen: “create exuberant”, “live livid”, “delete ordinary”, “break moulds” and, most importantly, “copy nothing”.

With no cars featured, this was instead a statement of intent by Jaguar ahead of the announcement of a new electric-only car range on Monday 2nd December. Regardlessly, it was met with knee-jerk derision by commentators and social media accounts, using the ad as a vehicle for their existing prejudices by accusing Jaguar of junking their heritage to embrace diversity and “wokeness”, as if they were trying to make more of a point beyond the slogans in the ad, rendering anything not presented straightforwardly as being suspect. 

This invective felt like the inverse of the jokes I made in an article I wrote back in 2017, about the then-new Range Rover Velar helping people to identify and come out as Range Rover drivers: “I should be more open-minded and respectful about the life choices people make, and learn more about what leads to people wanting to drive a Range Rover. The more we know, the more the world can be a better place - so long as we don’t cut each other up.”

I was also unimpressed with the derision of Jaguar’s new image as having appeared from nowhere, as if years of preparation hadn’t been made in formulating Jaguar’s new approach – they are moving upmarket from making “executive” cars that competed with BMW and Audi, becoming a high-end brand alongside the likes of Bentley and Porsche – along with stopping production lines to retool their factories for the new range of cars, also the culmination of years of development.

Predictably, the aesthetic of the ad prompted people to ask if Jaguar had started making clothes, as if licensing deals between car and clothing manufacturers had ever existed, and others that included a direct competitor to Jaguar, Tesla’s Elon Musk, said “Don’t you sell cars?”, a reference to none being shown in the ad, to which Jaguar’s managing director Rawdon Glover said, “Yes. We’d love to show you”.

I had thought that people would have looked at the ad more closely, or looked more than once – it was only thirty seconds long. In two scenes, areas are painted over or illuminated with lines, a reference to the “strikethrough” imagery that forms both the new use of the Jaguar “prowler” logo – the main Jaguar logo is now just a sans-serif wordmark – and a design motif that will feature on the new range.

Despite the startling difference with Jaguar’s former establishment image – the Jaguar JX6 saloon was the British Prime Ministerial state car from 1979 to 2019, when Boris Johnson replaced it with a Range Rover – the ad was hardly the blindside to convention it has been made out to be. Those that remember a startling series of UK ads from 1995 that said only beautiful people drink Martini, depicting someone getting plastic surgery to comply,  will be aware of the disruptive tactics used by advertising agency Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury (HHCL), including the extraordinary Tango soft drink ads of the 1990s, and the launch of First Direct Bank in 1988 that “hijacked” ITV and Channel 4 simultaneously with a broadcast purportedly from the future. Jaguar needed people to start talking about Jaguar again before they could start talking about their cars, and couldn’t have achieved that aim more perfectly.

The slogan “copy nothing” comes from Jaguar’s founder, Sir William Lyons, who once said that “a Jaguar should be a copy of nothing”. He had a point. Walking down one street in my home town, not necessarily the most affluent but just above average, there were three Jaguars from the current model range, all of which have been withdrawn this year: an XE saloon, an XF saloon, and an F-Type coupé. Only the Jaguar badge and grille distinguished them outwardly from the other cars in the street, all of which have the same raked, aerodynamic lines and pull-out door handles. Even worse, I passed an X-Type estate car, made during the period of Jaguar’s ownership by Ford, and based on the mass-market Ford Mondeo – you get the feeling the car should not have been allowed to happen.

When the notorious car conglomerate British Leyland was formed in 1968, merging the firm that owned Jaguar with the parent company of Rover, both names were used on cars that drove heads of state, not “executives”. This was rationalised to make Rover the more “affordable” brand, and perhaps the cars Jaguar had wound up making could, if it still existed, have been branded as Rovers – Jaguar’s current parent company, Jaguar Land Rover, have owned the Rover brand since 2008, but have seen no reason to use it so far.

Speaking of Land Rover, and any comparisons of the Jaguar ad to a clothes or perfume manufacturer are also a little ironic when you consider how the Range Rover, which has turned over time from a utility vehicle to a luxury SUV, once named its must luxurious trim level “Vogue”, after the magazine. This shift, alongside the shift in car buyers’ tastes towards sports utility vehicles, has directly benefitted Range Rover, perhaps at the expense of Jaguar, whose own SUVs were built on the same platforms as the Range Rover Evoque and Velar. In the current car climate, Range Rover effectively ate Jaguar’s lunch, hence the need to reposition themselves.

The new Jaguar cars – an XJ6-like saloon, a grand tourer coupé, and a further SUV – will reportedly start from £100,000, which is the same as a large Range Rover, but a bit more than a Porsche. I don’t know why they didn’t just go with “POA” – “price on application” – because if you have to ask how much a luxury item costs, you can’t afford it anyway. That is the realm where Jaguar is destined or, for those that admire creativity without being able to drive, where it remains.

GET INTO MY BIG BLACK CAR [401]

I have now been to New York City twice, but one major detail I don’t remember seeing in 2011 became a fixation in 2023: the slow-moving traffic being punctuated by grossly oversized sports utility vehicles, always coloured black, with blacked-out windows, criss-crossing the city’s grid.

The only kind of vehicle as prevalent as these cars were the taxis, the old Checker cabs and Ford Crown Victorias long replaced by the Ford Escape (sold as the Kuga in the UK), the Nissan NV200 van and the Toyota RAV4 SUV – the Nissan took us from JFK airport, and the Toyota brought us back. But, of course, they were taxis, brightly coloured with uniform decals making them clearly visible as vehicles for hire. 

The black SUVs, other than their number plates, were unmarked, their purpose unclear. The tinted windows in the back of my parents’ car makes me feel like a low-level diplomat when I’m sat inside, but there can’t be that many of them in New York – the United Nations headquarters was at the end of the 42nd Street hotel in which we were staying, but I saw none of them stopping there.

The only clue to these cars’ identities was at the end of our trip, when we asked the hotel concierge to book a taxi, and we were asked if we wanted a taxi or SUV. Of course, we said we wanted a taxi, but that finally made the embarrassingly late connection for me.

I am now aware about the numerous private companies providing “black car service” for airport transfers and around the city, replacing purpose-built limousines, and particularly stretch limousines, with more discrete SUVs that have the same design as each other. They are all around 220 inches long (5.6 metres), weigh nearly three tons, have bonnets/hoods that come up to my shoulder and, most importantly, have three rows of seats, carrying up to nine people, making them sound more like a bus.

I now also know that the gargantuan Cadillac Escalade, the black car flashing the most chrome, was introduced in answer to the Lincoln Navigator, but just as the Lincoln is a warmed-up Ford Expedition, the Cadillac is a more luxurious Chevrolet Suburban or GMC Yukon and, fitting the evolution of the American SUV, they are all longer-wheelbase versions of other cars and pick-up trucks made by Ford and General Motors. The only reason I didn’t see a Chrysler badge on any of these cars is because their competing brand is Jeep, and I never saw a black one of those.

The original Chevrolet “Carryall Suburban” went on sale in 1934 as a station wagon built on a truck body, while the luxury 4x4 vehicle originates with the low-stance, car-like Jeep Wagoneer of 1962. Separately, the Range Rover was introduced in 1969 as a more liveable version of Land Rover’s utilitarian vehicles, still having an interior that could be hosed down if required, and later officially arriving in the United States through more highly appointed “Vogue”, after the magazine, and “Autograph” trim levels. Now, they all occupy the same luxury space, the current Range Rover now over three feet longer than its original model, but far less visible in New York than the American brands of truck.

Now I know what they are, did I miss out on taking a ride in one of these black SUVs? No – it would have felt like being driven around in my hotel room.

ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER [274]

The Ineos Grenadier is an off-road car to be released in 2022, following a six-year process where Sir Jim Ratcliffe pushed his chemicals company, most well-known as a sponsor of cycling and sailing teams, into car production to fulfil Ratcliffe’s dream of building a modern, rugged vehicle in the spirit of the original Land Rover of 1948...

...or, when Jaguar Land Rover declined to sell Ratcliffe the tooling and moulding for the previous model Land Rover Defender, which ended production in 2016, he decided to build a vehicle that looks so much like the original Defender that, if it drove past you, you could mistake it for one. Some edges have been smoothed off, and the front and rear lights are different, but apart from that, the Grenadier – named after the pub in which Ratcliffe and his team conceived the idea – appears to be for people that wanted the old Land Rover Defender, but didn’t want to buy second-hand.

In a September 2020 article for “Autocar” magazine [https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/ineos-grenadier-2021], reporting on the 17,000 pre-orders received so far, designer Toby Ecuyer, usually known for his work on superyachts, appeared relaxed about the Grenadier’s resemblance to the Defender: “It has been fascinating, benchmarking all the cars we have. One thing I’ve learned is how little there is between cars. I mean, you only have to change a vehicle a little to make it look like something different. Shift the headlights a bit and you’ve suddenly made a Ford Bronco.” Fortunately, the rest of the interview suggests more passion than this one answer suggests.

(It should be noted that, in August 2020, Jaguar Land Rover lost in the litigation it brought against Ineos, when a judge upheld a decision by the Intellectual Property Office decided that the Defender’s design wasn’t distinctive enough to be trademarked, highlighting previous models of the Jeep Wrangler and Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen as examples of similar-looking designs [https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/jaguar-land-rovers-trademark-court-case-testimonies-revealed].)

Looking on the Ineos Grenadier website [www.ineosgrenadier.com], it is made clear the purpose of the car defines the design: “We’re building on the legacy of classic 4x4s. A box-section ladder frame. Permanent four-wheel drive. Beam axles. And a boxy body that’s designed rather than styled.” The car is “a working tool. More angles than curves. Function dictates form, every time. It exists because Ratcliffe “identified a gap in the market for a stripped back, no-nonsense, utilitarian 4x4.”

Surely Land Rover filled this gap over seventy years ago? The only reason Sir Jim Ratcliffe could have perceived a gap was Jaguar Land Rover’s ending of the Defender’s production, but this was more a case of their hand being forced in January 2016 rather than choice. Safety and emissions regulations precluded the Defender from being sold in various parts of the world, and had been withdrawn from sale in North America back in 1997 when the car’s design, already heavily modified for the market, was unable to accommodate side airbags. The new 2020 model Defender, using a more standard aluminium unibody structure and air suspension as standard, was designed to meet safety standards worldwide, and if it results in a car perceived as more upmarket than its predecessor, that appears to have been the result of remaining vital and competitive.

Declining to allow Ratcliffe to buy the original Defender’s tooling does not mean that Land Rovers have previously been built, under license, by other companies. Much like the notorious Lada Riva was a Russian evolution of the original Fiat 124, and the Seat Alhambra was a modified Fiat Panda produced after Seat’s license to build the original expired, the Spanish manufacturer Santana moved from being a builder of Land Rover-supplied “complete knock-down kits” to making their own legally-distinguishable version when their license ended in 1983 – the final version of it was also sold in Italy by Fiat, as the Iveco Massif, before they merged with Chrysler and started importing Jeep vehicles instead. (Fiat appears to be the centre of derived car designs – add in variations made in Bulgaria, Egypt, Turkey, India and South Korea, and the Fiat 124 lays a claim to being the most popular car in the world.)

With pre-orders and a court case resolved, all Ineos have to do now is start building the Grenadier. Originally seen as being a leader of British manufacturing following Brexit, with a new factory to be built in Bridgend, there was disappointment when Ineos decided to instead buy the Daimler-Benz plant at Hambach, France, to be vacated when production of Smart car series moved to China. To be fair to them, they had not promised that the Grenadier would be built in the UK – the underlying ladder frame is being built in Austria, and the engines are being supplied by BMW. Then again, the new Land Rover Defender isn’t being made in the UK either: with the original space at the Jaguar Land Rover factory in Solihull filled by production of other sports utility vehicles, namely the Jaguar X-Pace and Range Rover Velar, the Defender is being made at a facility in Mitra, Slovakia, alongside the Land Rover Discovery.

WE HAVE THE CHANCE TO TURN THE PAGES OVER [100]

This is my one hundredth article for “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers,” probably the best blog title in the world, and I thank you all for reading what began as a weekly writing exercise in May 2016. I must have written at least sixty thousand words since then but, perhaps more importantly, sales of the “Daily Mail” newspaper fell by over two hundred thousand copies in that time. I know these figures are not related, but I have more to say about this later.

What I love about writing is the process, the build-up, the formation of an idea. This usually culminates in a frenzy of typing at the last possible moment, like this one has, especially if the ideas came later. For months, I assumed trying to equate the outlandish nature of the current political climate with Dadaist performance art did not work out, leaving me with lessons for next time, but that article, using a quote from Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play “Ubu Roi” – “That’s a beautiful speech, but nobody’s listening” – has become the most popular article so far.

Other moments of apparent madness included making blue pyramids of Quorn, making the food more attractive to children’ the assertion that “ain’t” is a proper word that adds punch to song lyrics; that our old family car, an Austin Ambassador with a brown interior, is now one of the rarest production cars in Britain; that people build super-basements so they no longer have to go out; that there are many types of Range Rover to help those that identify as Range Rover drivers, so they can live their life the way they feel; and that Donald Trump is the first world leader to restrict his own ability to speak, rather than restrict his own people. When there is always a next time, ideas come freely.

But what if time is running out? With endless space online, and a curious brain that won’t shut up, my writing has no reason to cease, but what if I was a newspaper, speaking with a one-track mind, in a country where newspaper sell fewer copies than ever?

The world knows “Daily Mail” as the most-read news website in the English, with a very showbiz-led mix on its brightly coloured front page, but UK residents also know it as a very conservative, populist newspaper that makes many people want to spit – you can buy t-shirts and badges saying, “I’m the one the Daily Mail warned you about”. It began in 1896, but its current form evolved in 1971, when the seriously-minded broadsheet “Mail” was merged with a more populist tabloid paper, the “Daily Sketch,” with “Sketch” staff effectively taking over the new compact “Mail,” building a fiercely confident, conservative voice that, within a few years, overturned fifty years of the “Daily Express” beating it at its own game – the “Mail” now sells as much as the “Express,” “Daily Mirror” and “Daily Star” put together.

So why did I mention the “Mail’s” sales had fallen? Looking at figures quoted by the “Press Gazette” website, its circulation peaked at 2.59 million copies in September 2001. By February 2018, that figure halved to 1.34 million, down eleven percent on the previous year. The global shift to online put printed newspapers into decline, and when Mail Online effectively gives you the same content for free, why bother with the “Daily Mail” at all?

After reading it for the last month, I wish I knew. I consider myself to be politically in the centre, but I am definitely to the left of the “Mail.” It reads like a magazine, using many double-page spreads of stories and opinion pieces in high-contrast black on white type, bellowing its points down to the reader in length and in depth. Using these pages to brand Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn an informant to a Communist spy, and ex-Formula One boss Max Mosley as much of a racist as his father, everyone with connections to them are also scrutinised and judged for their reactions, and the BBC is criticised for not covering either of the stories at the same length – when Mosley didn’t reply  how the “Mail” wanted, the next day’s headline was “STILL HE WON’T APOLOGISE.” Based on what was printed, both Corbyn and Mosley have some questions to answer, but the “Mail” has already found them guilty as hell, let alone guilty as charged, and any raising of their voices is a threat to a free press.

There has also been the A-Z of Millennial speak, the A-Z of Baby Boomer speak, the “witch hunt” against men by “Hollywood feminists,” how political correctness causes sense of humour failure, stories about the pro-EU bias by inbred left-wing taxpayer-funded BBC, and the usual stuff about politicians, tax avoiders, judges and investment bankers trying to thwart Brexit, preventing the will of the British people. The last of these included a page-length editorial comment with the headline, “They just don’t get it, do they? This elitist class imposing THEIR views on ordinary people…”

I think the “Mail” gets off on hearing itself rage. If the “Mail” were a person, I would run away.

The last months of screaming words has been overwhelming, the spectacle of the Metropolitan liberal elite being lambasted by the Metropolitan conservative elite seemed like an ironic and pointless bonfire, as the “Mail’s” sales continue to fall – Mail Online hides many of the double-page spreads under a link to “Columnists,” leaving the bigger stories to generate views and revenue. For all the outrage over the content of the “Daily Mail” as a newspaper, for how it currently uses acres of paper to tell us to stop using plastic, and for all the advertising boycotts by Lego, Paperchase and Center Parcs, there remains one thing: the figures show the newspaper is dying anyway. Unless the website can support it when printing on paper is too unprofitable to continue, we will live to see the end of the “Daily Mail” – it will happen, it will absolutely happen.

One day, just as in the dream that gave me the name for this blog, I may turn “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers” into an album, where I will yell at those that tell you what to think, singing “all they have are words” until fadeout. I don’t know if that will be in the next hundred articles, but I will see where my mind takes me.

AND I’M TRYING HARD TO FIT AMONG YOUR SCHEME OF THINGS [89]

I showed 2017 the back of my hand months ago. Events, days, news cycles and realities changed multiple times daily, and questioning it drained us. Rather than try and make sense of it one more time, I offer below the choicest sentences from my last year. Happy with appearing to know what I was talking about, I hope 2018 is the peaceful and brilliant year we need – if it is not, we’ll build that lunar colony together.

*

It is not enough knowing where you can go, it’s making sense of what you find… Anyone who thinks they have it all worked out should be checked to see if they are already dead… Everything bubbles to the surface, and what a surface to pick from.

If you can put aside the usual attempts to find a rational, objective, absolute truth, and think about how truth and knowledge are constructed out of all the discussions and interpretations that led to it, then you will understand it more than just having it handed to you on a plate.

We must now also contend with the new term “alternative facts,” i.e. facts that counter the facts most unhelpful to your own cause… Failing to inform the public could even be considered as anti-social… If there is a moment to be seized, you have to make a persuasive argument. If it has been made before, then it has to be clear why it is worth making the case again.

George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” gave us the idea of “Newspeak” as a way of restricting the population’s ability to articulate itself, allowing the rulers to control them more easily – but what if the head of state does it to themselves first?

When the on-off-volume switch fell off, it was replaced by the end of a used chapstick, jammed into the hole to serve for nearly a full decade.

We rely on “Big Data” to anticipate our needs, demands, and wishes. What that means, however, is that companies can no longer be in a position to guess what people might need.

You may have always identified as a Range Rover driver before you could own one, or it could be something you have only recently recognised about yourself… My view of Range Rover drivers, and their cars, has come from prejudice, and that is only because I don’t know enough about the subject… I should be more open-minded and respectful about the life choices people make, and learn more about what leads to people wanting to drive a Range Rover.

For many, libraries are still a valuable resource that are too useful to lose, even if I find it harder to find a use for mine. Even for something delightfully obscure, knowledge should not be made harder to find and, if we going to stay online instead, nothing can be left behind.

This is not the first time I bought something because the packaging made me laugh.

If you were in a society that only spoke Newspeak, the need for slang would arise very quickly. Just as the secretive lexicons of Cockney rhyming slang and Polari arose within London in the last century, being able to speak openly is essential to be able to live, and if you need different words to achieve that, you will find them.

Freedom of speech is paramount in this world – all opinions should be able to be heard, then we can decide on their merit. I am not the type of person who tells people that the truth is being kept from them, or that they are blind to it, because I would need to have concrete evidence to prove that, unless I wanted to engage in conspiracy theory. When certain voices think they have been silenced, because one outlet decides they don’t want them there anymore, they should think whether that place has its own voices to protect, or whether they might have been in the wrong place to begin with. Every voice has its own place and, if requires, what it says can be tested, in a court of law.

I think Nick Knowles was there too.

Good debate needs everyone to speak the same language to each other, and good society allows everyone to participate without pissing about over using language to exclude people.

Donald Trump uses “fake news” like the main character of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” Holden Caulfield, calls everyone “goddam phoneys.”

Does this mean that any attempt that writing something that is deliberately nonsense is doomed to be made sense of by the next person to come into contact with it? Possibly, so long as there was a reason to do it.

People can believe whatever they want, but if you do want to cut your nose off to spite your face, don’t be surprised if people happy with their own noses decide to offer you a scalpel – and if you think this will work instead, trying to sound reasonable will not work either, especially if the words are not there.

The dream that gave me the name “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” was my having recorded an album, rock and/or electronic in nature, in which one song led to my shouting “all you have are words” over and over again. Despite what others may choose to do with their words, they are all I have too.

I CALL HER DOUBLE R, MY ROUGH RIDER [44]

More than any other car is the “Range Rover” a badge of identity. Range Rover owners have chosen to make a statement about yourself, literally sitting them intimidatingly above the rest of the traffic, and in luxury putting them further above even the vans and buses. They never worry about the cost of fuel, and may never go off-road either. they want people to know they have a Range Rover, so it is already written on the front for you.  They own a Range Rover because they can afford one.

If this sounds like you, I can only offer my congratulations. You may have always identified as a Range Rover driver before you could own one, or it could be something you have only recently recognised about yourself. Once you have accepted yourself, the rest of your life is ahead of you, and all you need to do is drive.

Land Rover are doing their best to encourage Range Rover drivers to come out. Once the original Range Rover, launched in 1970, made driving a 4x4 vehicle as a regular car an acceptable option, the identity of the brand flourished, replacing vinyl seats with leather, moving from three doors to five, and introducing air conditioning. No longer would it be acceptable to shower the interior out with a hose, so by the first redesign of the Range Rover’s body was unveiled in 1994, we had arrived at the archetypal Rolls Royce on tractor tyres, or “land-yacht.”

However, one of the Range Rover’s original engineers, Spen King, said it was, “never intended as a status symbol but later incarnations of my design seem to be intended for that purpose.” It has been parodied by BMW, Porsche, Audi, Volvo, Jaguar, and even Bentley.

The expanded Range Rover range is incomparable, because comparisons create disappointment: drivers of the Range Rover Sport are driving something that hopes to fool people into thinking it is “The Range Rover,” looking and sounding as much like “The Range Rover” as possible, despite being a bit smaller, and a bit cheaper. The “entry-level” Evoque exists to create an “entry-level”, and the new Velar, unveiled last Wednesday (1^st March), exists to compete with fancy cars like the Porsche Macan, the sort of land-yacht you find in Kensington and Chelsea.

To be honest, I really should not be judging this. My view of Range Rover drivers, and their cars, has come from prejudice, and that is only because I don’t know enough about the subject. I am not someone that will become a Range Rover driver, and I have never felt like I am supressing a part of personality. I should be more open-minded and respectful about the life choices people make, and learn more about what leads to people wanting to drive a Range Rover. The more we know, the more the world can be a better place - so long as we don’t cut each other up.