What Would Keith Moon Do? Rolls-Royce Dunks a Phantom in the Pool

• As part of the nameplate's 100^th anniversary, Rolls-Royce has taken a Phantom Extended swimming.

• Its a re-creation of a famous, if possibly apocryphal, story about The Who drummer Keith Moon.

• The Phantom has long been a backdrop to icons of popular music.

Celebrating its 100^th anniversary this year, Rolls-Royce's Phantom is the defining nameplate of the marque. By way of celebration, the company has planned appearances at important automotive events, specially commissioned vehicles, celebrations of brand heritage—and a spot of Phantom summer bathing. Yes, that's a Rolls-Royce in a pool you're seeing.

This performance piece isn't intended to show how the Phantom's build quality features watertight panel gaps or invoke comparisons to a sort of roadgoing Queen Mary II luxury liner. Instead, it's a re-creation of one of the most popular stories of rock-n'-roll excess, a story that might never have actually happened.

Still a good myth doesn't need to been true to sound right. As the story goes, in 1971, The Who drummer Keith Moon drove his Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool in Flint, Michigan, as a way of livening up a party. It's exactly the sort of thing you could believe about the hard-partying Moon, who was the epitome of hard-rocking bad behavior and was known to test the water-resistance of a hotel TV or two while on tour.

It's a good story, and quibbling about whether or not it was actually a Lincoln or just something Moon made up to get a rise out of a reporter needn't get in the way of the re-telling. Here, Rolls-Royce used an extended-body-shell car that was bound for the scrapyard anyway, partially submerging it in the outdoor pool at Tinside Lido in Plymouth, U.K.

Tinside has a bit of Beatles history to it, having appeared in a photo from the era when they were filming The Magical Mystery Tour. Famously, during that same year of 1967, John Lennon released his psychedelic yellow Phantom, all painted up like a Romany traveling wagon. That particular Phantom did not do any bathing, although had it done so, perhaps it would have qualified as a yellow submarine.

With its Art Deco–themed design and fountains, Tinside Lido is elegant enough for a Rolls-Royce photo shoot, but there's something sardonically working-class about the name. "Lido" is Italian for beach, and one of the original London public swimming pools picked up the nickname as a sort of tongue-in-cheek contrast between what ordinary city dwellers had access to and the glamour of the Riviera. Soon enough, every outdoor pool was called a lido.

But certainly few of them have a Phantom doing the breaststroke. Rolls-Royce is using this stunt to highlight the Phantom's long association with popular music, from Sir Elton John to modern hip-hop, both wealthy elegance and riotous excess. Here's hoping someone remembered to back an extra-large high-thread-count towel.

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