Page 129 - Bespoke Issue

WORDS & IMAGES JOHN J. BREEN
Thursday morning, early: I am driving to a photoshoot at Busy Down Farm on the South Downs, its December, bitterly cold wind, urries of snow and sleet and the occasional burst of ferocious driving torrential rain, I kid you not. Then the SatNav decides to send me down a cart track, not wide enough for a donkey never mind the cart. My radio keeping me company. The next song on the radio as I negotiate the lanes is “The Road to hell” and followed by “Driving home for Christmas”, both songs portraying memories we all have at this time of year.
All this is particularly poignant as I was fortunate to have the pleasure of meeting Chris Rea in the 1980s at Wembley Arena. I was there to photograph Chris for a well known microphone company for one of their advertising campaigns. Before the show we are in the green room, or the bar in lay mans terms, with his good friend James Hunt and his usual bevvy of blondes, but the boys are all talking cars, especially the Sharknose Ferrari and the 1961 Monza Grand Prix. Little was I to know that night that, thirty odd years later I would be driving to photograph not one but two of Chris’s passions. A brace of “Sharknose” Ferraris.
Chris went on to make (or try, in his words) La Passione in 1996, a lm about a ten year old Northern boy, the son of an Italian immigrant ice cream making family who develops a life long obsession with motor racing and especially Wolfgang von Trips - who was killed in his Sharknose Ferrari at the 1961 Monza Grand Prix. The movie is inspired by Rea’s own childhood experience.
Chris originally wanted to direct his own screenplay, but the lm distributers (Warner Vision) did not let him. to which he felt that they went on to turn his simple tale of childhood fantasy into something else. Chris felt very disappointed with this and his idea about how fantasies occur and about passions and enjoying them. Warner didn’t understand this according to Rea and in his own words turned it into a “Boring lm”.
My own mission into the wilds of the South Downs is far from boring and more about those passions and fantasies. I am going to get to photograph two very special cars, that is if the weather doesn’t deteriorate any further.
I eventually arrive at Bushy Down farm, not via SatNav, but an old fashioned phone call and directions from Daniel Setford owner of Setford Racing.
Daniel set up Setford and Company after working at one of the country’s leading restorers. He and his
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