Rolls-Royce Phantom 100: A Century in Music and Myth

To mark its hundredth anniversary, Rolls-Royce has reached for a familiar trick: tie its flagship to pop culture. The press release grandly claims that the Phantom has been the “icon of icons,” shadowing musical history from the jazz age to hip hop, as though the stately sedan had been a hidden protagonist all along. The roll call is certainly impressive—Marlene Dietrich, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Liberace, Elton John, 50 Cent—but the truth is simpler. The Phantom has rarely been a creative tool. It has almost always been a prop of status.

Still, the anecdotes are irresistible. Dietrich’s green Phantom I became part of Hollywood’s golden-age stagecraft. Elvis’s car doubled as a mirror for his chickens. Lennon’s psychedelic Phantom V turned into a flower-power manifesto that scandalised London’s older set. Each story is colourful, but each also reinforces the same point: the Phantom functioned like an expensive stage costume, a way of declaring that one had arrived.

Later the tales grew more absurd. Liberace drove onto the stage in a Phantom covered in mirror tiles, effectively his own rolling disco ball. Elton John impulsively bought one from a Manchester dealership en route to a concert and gifted another to a bandmate after a Soviet tour paid him in coal rather than cash. Rolls-Royce, as ever, thrived on a mix of glamour and the ridiculous.

Then there is the enduring myth of Keith Moon supposedly drowning his Phantom in a hotel swimming pool. Whether true or not, it has lodged in collective memory so firmly that the brand now winks at the legend, even staging a symbolic recreation by sinking an old body panel to the bottom of a pool for a centenary campaign.

In the modern era the narrative is more predictable. Hip hop has turned Rolls-Royce once again into a global shorthand for status. From Snoop Dogg and Pharrell’s music videos to Lil Wayne’s album covers and 50 Cent’s TV shows, the Phantom has become less a car than a rolling advertising channel. The “stars in the roof”—the Starlight Headliner—has morphed into a cliché of its own in rap lyrics and videos.

The Phantom has never been a revolutionary artwork in itself. It is, rather, a mirror—reflecting the success, eccentricity and excess of those behind the wheel. Rolls-Royce can talk loftily about “a shared ambition to make presence felt,” but history suggests something more prosaic: the Phantom has simply always been there, ready to absorb whatever colour, meaning or myth its latest owner decided to project upon it.