ICE at Top Gear Live – improved re-write!
One of the biggest TV shows in the world, with different versions worldwide and a huge 2.1 million readership magazine has spawned a live show to be king of the car shows. Top Gear Live is not about car clubs and enthusiasts of modded motors but rather the Big Boys Toys. You had Jay Kay’s Ferrari (one of 52 cars in his collection these days, I gather) sat on the Autoglym stand. Small boys being photographed by their dads in front of the Bugatti Veyron on the Clive Sutton stand and more gorgeous and expensive schoolboy wank-fantasy metal about that you could shake your oil can at. I swear I got so excited my nipples hurt!
And these days, in times of OEM dominance and a shrinking world for aftermarket 12V HiFi, it has been deemed a Good Idea to get in the faces of the 65,000 show-goers to TGL. Thus, organised by one of the biggest and most active ICE retailers in the UK, Car Audio & Security, our trade had some bragging space.
CAS’ clout meant they could go hire the space and have Alpine, Pioneer and Kenwood join in, along with Vibe, to fill the stand with wicked cars. They had CAS’s own JBL and Infinity demo cars belonging to the staff. They had the cream of the Vibe brand demo cars there. They had the Pioneer Brabus Smart with the DJ kit in the back and they had the wrapped and dropped Kenwood Scirocco. Atsuhiro Takeda was there for Alpine with his tuneful and tasteful Passat and had this tell us about the show and why they joined in with Car Audio & Security, before showing off a new toy – the double-DIN ICS X8 (this is hot – not yet released at date of publication here!):
The boss of CAS had hired a lovely lissom lass to be his promo girl. She is a dancer named Kamran one look at the silken muscled pins on this gal shows that and as well as all sorts of posh UK gigs, has been in a Bollywood movie (Lots of wicked dancers!) Utterly unsurprising then to see boys and men falling over each other to ask if they could have their picture taken with her!
I will freely admit that in these days of so much glamour photography on Facebook and just how many of my FB chums are promo lasses and wanna be pro models, that hey, I thought it’d be a GREAT idea to take some girly shots. You can see, from my shots of another snapper doing a better job with her, that I was not nearly persuasive enough! (Nor talented…damn!)
But then his camera was far bigger than mine.
I met the young new boys of both Alpine and Kenwood, which was nice and discovered that Kenwood’s Watkins-San does a bloody brilliant impression of me doing my ‘Adam Rayner, signing off for Talk Audio TV’ line! Git!
Here he is, with James Howe, seasoned Kenwood executive, talking about what they were getting out of being at the show:
Meanwhile, as I say, I was taking lots of pics of Kamran, so yes, it was an awesome show, I just popped along in the evening when everyone was in the huge event theatres. You can hear Steve ‘˜Baggsy’ Biagioni squealing in the sound track!
Two Alpine lads meet African Stig
Kamran is gorgeous!