NZV8: We’ve just heard about your crazy Alaska adventure. Who the hell are you and how do you get yourself into these situations?
Ben Wilson (AKA Charlie Safari): I grew up in this little town in South Wales called Tredegar. It was a coal and steel town, there was really nothing there and cars were hard to get. We had cars like Morris Marinas, Austin Maxis and my family’s craziest car which was my Grandfather’s Fiat Mirafiori. He got talked into it by the Fiat dealer, and immediately regretted it.
I was so obsessed with cars that when my uncle used to take me to pre-school, as he would push me in the pram, I would look at the cars in the scrap yard. There was always something interesting there. That was kind of where it started.
Then I met a guy called Dave Morris. He was like the leather jacket-clad, cool dude who used to drive a Mustang around (you know: tassels in the roof, dralon interior). Bear in mind, American cars weren’t seen back then in Wales as people didn’t like them. They were just like, ‘Why would you drive that? It’s massive. You can’t get down these little, tiny streets, they’re terrible on fuel.’ But Dave would drive past in a Mustang and I was like… ‘that’s me’.
Then, I kind of got to know him. Me and my mate Jonesy used to cycle all over the place to look at cars. Somebody would say: ‘I’ve seen a ‘59 Cadillac’, and I’m like ‘rubbish, there’s no ‘59 Cadillacs here.’ It was at least 20 miles away, but we would jump on our push bikes and we’d ride over to see these horribly rusty, devastated cars. Eventually, we ran into a place called Talega Muscle Machines or South Wales Muscle Machines — whatever it was called — and it was just two guys [one of whom was Dave] in the garage working on cars. So we rolled up and said: ‘Oh, look, there’s a Mustang’ and ‘there’s a Camaro’, or there was a Dodge Charger there. I was just like, this is amazing, I’m like never leaving. So I said: ‘Hey, Dave, like, you know, can I help? I want to do something.’ He was like: ‘You can make the tea, you can sweep the floors, you can kind of clean up welding stuff.’
And then [he] was like: ‘Do you watch any films? Do you like any music?’ And I’m like, ‘I love films, but I haven’t got any.’ So he’d tape car movies off the TV and give them to me to watch and I would take home Two-Lane Blacktop, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry… Hot Rod; all these old ‘70s car movies. He made me a mixtape with Led Zeppelin on it, and things like that. So I’m kind of a mini-Dave, I think.
We built a Mustang together…. kind of, he built it, I made the tea. Eventually I graduated to like bolting things in and then maybe cleaning up to go to the shows. He had to look after me like [I was] one of his kids. He would cook dinner and I’d have dinner with his kids and everything. That was kind of how I got into it.
“YOU’VE GOT EVERYTHING THAT IS TOTALLY RANDOM. I LOVE IT HERE”
The very first thing
