During a performance at the G8 Summit in 1998, Jools Holland and his band started a version of All You Need Is Love that French president Jacques Chirac mistook for his national anthem. Chirac rose for the song’s opening bars, so to avoid embarrassing him, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin also stood. Then they all realized it was a pop song, and broke out into the kind of awkward, f*ck-we’re-on-camera dancing you might expect of a cabal of aging world leaders.
But this isn’t about Mr. Holland, his band or his music. It’s about his car.
The car that the former member of Squeeze used to own is a 1963 Corvette Stingray coupe, one of the first models to be built with a split rear window design. In addition to that anomaly, the Sting Ray also had a new chassis featuring Corvette’s first four-wheel independent suspension.
While the chassis design proved to be built to last, the split rear window proved otherwise, and was discontinued after just a year, which makes the ‘63 Stingray coupe an extremely rare find.
The coupe Holland used to own — which is being sold by Sotheby’s for around $100,000 — is still coated in its original blue paint job but does have an upgraded 350-cubic inch Chevrolet V8.
“The model has become something of a design classic and is renowned for its combination of European-inspired high style and American brawn,” Sotheby’s says. “It remains coveted by collectors as a landmark in the history of what may be Chevrolet’s most important model.”
If you love rare cars, the ’63 Stingray could be all you need.
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