Ronnie Lane And Slim Chance The Passing Show Tour Bus

Ronnie Lane And Slim Chance The Passing Show Tour Bus:
As of January 2021 this bus has been SOLD!

Ronnie Lane and The Red Passing Show Tour Bus

Ronnie Lane & The Red Passing Show Tour Bus

YES!
The Passing Show Tour Bus that appears on the back cover of Ronnie Lane's 1976 One For The Road album!

Listen to Ronnie Lane's One For The Road album (deluxe version) on Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/album/18t1foZISPoi1liGHMee9U

Ronnie Lane Passing Show Tour Bus: SOLD!
INFORMATION from the current owner:

Guy GS 28 bus, one of 84 buses built in 1952,

The bus is in good mechanical condition and has been maintained in a roadworthy condition.

Ronnie owned the bus in the mid to late 1970s.

Main feature & tour bus transport for the short The Passing Show Tour.

Ronnie Lane used the bus to pull a showman's caravan called "Queenie" for The Passing Show.

It was modified inside like a camper for Ronnie.

The bus body has probably been to the Moon and back with London transport.

Sometime on a motorway journey, they blew the engine probably because they were driving it like a car.

Consequently, the bus was then taken to Hereford where a Perkins agency, called Prales, fully reconditioned the engine. A local chap called Les drove it back from Hereford to Fishpool.

The engine has done a maximum of 10k miles since being reconditioned, as it just gets a couple of outings per year.

Ronnie became ill not long after this time and the bus was mostly parked up for a few years.

The current owner acquired the bus from the family and has owned and cared for the bus ever since and has been continually maintained in a roadworthy condition.

It has had recent new tyres, brakes, pipes etc.

It starts as it should and runs as it should.

Some of the original seats, as per London Transport, are still available if someone is curious enough to want to convert it back to an original condition.

Ronnie Lane Red Passing Show Tour Bus -outside

Ronnie Lane Red Passing Show Tour Bus -back

Ronnie Lane And Slim Chance The Passing Show Tour Bus Interior

Ronnie Lane The Red Passing Show Tour Bus -Interior

For questions & inquiries about Ronnie Lane's Passing Show tour bus
contact: [email protected]

1952 GS: The Guy Special Bus

The bus is an ex London Countryand used to be operated
by London Transport in rural areas, It is a Guy and used to
be painted green and were found operating in Hertford area
in very early 60s!

At the start of the fifties London Transport's Country Area found itself with a need to replace its ageing fleet of Leyland Cubs. The rear-engined Cubs built just before the war were not deemed to be the required solution, and the new RF class were too large for the little country lanes that were served by these buses. (Later, of course, the natural widening of lanes by increased traffic meant that many such routes could be operated by RFs and RTs.) Another important factor was that the Cubs were the only remaining LT buses that were allowed to be used for one person operation, which was still restricted by regulations to twenty seaters. Replacement by crewed buses would be hopelessly uneconomic on these routes.

The answer was an updated normal-control Cub-style small bus: the Guy Special. In 1952 Guy produced chassis for the 84 buses, which received ECW bodywork with a family likeness to the RF (especially at the rear!). By agreement with the licensing authorities, they seated 26, but were still allowed to be single-manned. Sliding ventilators were fitted to windows rather than the standard wind-down type.
http://www.countrybus.org/GS/GS.html

Ronnie Lane and Slim Chance The Passing Show - Tour Dates & Music Releases
-Ronnie Lane publicly unveiled Slim Chance on November 11, 1973 – Armistice Day – on Clapham Common, South London, in a Chipperfield’s Circus tent.
-November 5, 1973 - per Pete Frame poster
-November 16, 1973 Ronnie lane and Slim Chance "How Come" single released
-March 15, 1974 Oxford
-The Passing Show premiered in Marlow, Buckinghamshire in June 1974, on the local football team’s training pitch
-May 27, 1974, per Pete Frame poster
-Bath
-Shrewsbury
-Chester
Were supposed to tour until the end of August
-Final gig at Newcastle July 14, 1974
-benefit for the Flixborough disaster
-July 26, 1974 Anymore For Anymore album released
-Singles: "The Poacher" and "Anymore For Anymore" released

Eric Clapton:
Tales Told Around The Ronnie Lane Passing Show Bus
The following excerpts are from Eric Clapton's autobiography "Clapton" (2007).
Here are a few Ronnie Lane stories (there are more) "Slowhand" weaves in his own words about events, happenings & time spent that occurred in the company of Ronnie Lane & this ultra-cool Passing Show bus!

Ronnie and Eric Clapton playing the Drum And Monkey in Shropshire in 1977 (Image credit: Rex)

"One day an old beat-up bus rolled up the drive at Hurtwood, and out stepped Ronnie Lane, whom I had known since I first met the Small Faces in a guitar shop in the West End. We had got to talking, and they invited me down to the studio where they were practicing. I remember watching them playing and thinking how great they were. The one I was attracted to most in terms of personality was Ronnie. He was sharp and well-dressed and very funny as well as being very gifted musically. Then, when we were doing rehearsals at Ronnie Wood’s for the Rainbow Concert, he would drop by, and I remembered thinking that I’d like to spend more time with him one day.

Ronnie was about to turn a corner in his life. He had left his first wife, Sue, and had taken up with a woman named Kate Lambert, who was into the world of travelers and carts, and the gypsy lifestyle, so he was going down a road already familiar to me from hanging with the Ormsby-Gore clan. I was immediately interested, particularly since I’d always known that we had a lot in common and that sooner or later we’d probably get together. They parked their bus outside the house and stayed with us for a while. They told us that they had bought a hundred-acre farm on the Welsh borders, called Fishpool, and were living there with a motley group of musicians and friends. It caught me like a bug, and I couldn’t wait to go up and visit them.

My fascination with the life that Ronnie described to me went back to something I had been exposed to a little bit with Steve Winwood when he was forming Traffic and I was forming Cream, and we had discussed the philosophy of what we wanted to do. Steve had said that for him it was all about unskilled labor, where you just played with your friends and fit the music around that. It was the opposite of virtuosity, and it rang a bell with me because I was trying so hard to escape the pseudo-virtuoso image I had helped create for myself.

Ronnie was into the same kind of thing, but it was much more convoluted because he was actually trying to combine his music with the running of a circus. It was called Ronnie Lane’s Passing Show, and it featured circus acts like jugglers, fire-eaters, and dancing girls as well as the band he had assembled, which he called Slim Chance, featuring, among others, Bruce Rowlands, Kevin Westlake, and Gallagher & Lyle. They would put up a big tent and then hang posters in the village, all done with a very casual approach. Whereas a real circus would have to get permission to go on the land a year in advance, they’d just turn up and put it up before anyone knew they were coming, and hope to get away with it. A certain number of the community would turn up, and if they were lucky, they’d make enough money to break even. This was a rarity, however, and the whole thing eventually fell to pieces.

Nell and I started to go and visit Ronnie and Kate in Wales. We’d just show up and blend in, and although there wasn’t a lot of room in the cottage, it didn’t seem to matter. I loved hanging out with Ronnie because we were both drinkers, and as we spent more time together, Ronnie’s musicality also began to rub off on me. Just like him, I was going through a very different period in my music. I’d been aware of J. J. Cale, and I was getting increasingly interested in country music and making music just for fun. I remember we once chartered a boat and sailed around the Med, and did a few shows off the boat in places like Ibiza and Barcelona. The band consisted of Ronnie and me, Charlie Hart on violin, Bruce Rowlands on drums, and Brian Belshaw on bass, and we’d sometimes set up on the quay and play like buskers while Nell and Kate would dress up in cancan outfits and dance. It was a complete fiasco and we certainly didn’t make any money, but it was a lot of fun. On another occasion, St. Valentine’s Day 1977, we played a secret gig at the Village Hall in Cranleigh, a village near Hurtwood, under the name of Eddie Earthquake and the Tremors. We did songs like “Alberta” and “Goodnight Irene,” and encouraged the audience of locals to dance and join in the singing.

What it was about, for me, was drinking and escaping my responsibilities as a bandleader, so I could just hang out and play for sheer enjoyment, and the music reflected this. Very homespun and mostly acoustic, it was in just this spirit that the song “Wonderful Tonight” was written. I wrote the words for this song one night at Hurtwood while I was waiting for Nell to get dressed to go out to dinner. We had a busy social life at that time, and Nell was invariably late getting ready. I was downstairs, waiting, playing the guitar to kill time. Eventually I got fed up and went upstairs to the bedroom, where she was still deciding what to wear.

I remember telling her, “Look, you look wonderful, okay? Please don’t change again. We must go or we’ll be late.” It was the classic domestic situation; I was ready and she wasn’t. I went back downstairs to my guitar, and the words of the song just came out very quickly. They were written in about ten minutes, and actually written in anger and frustration. I wasn’t that enamored with it as a song. It was just a ditty, as far as I was concerned, that I could just as easily have thrown away. The first time I played it was around the campfire up at Ronnie’s, when I was playing it for Nell, and playing it for Ronnie, too, and he liked it. I remember thinking, “I suppose I’d better keep this.”

“Wonderful Tonight” ended up on the album Slowhand, the first record I cut with Glyn Johns as producer, in the spring of 1977. " ~Eric Clapton

Clapton, Eric. Clapton.
Clapton: The Autobiography Crown/Archetype (2007) Kindle Edition.
https://www.amazon.com/Clapton-Autobiography-Eric-ebook/dp/B000W916DY

Abel's Harp - once the Drum & Monkey, Shropshire, England pub

Stories that it used to be possible to wander into pubs
in the Shropshire hills and find the likes of Eric Clapton
and Ronnie Lane giving unadvertised concerts....
http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/2016/02/eric-clapton-and-ronnie-lane-in.html
https://www.shropshirestar.com/entertainment/2016/02/01/when-eric-clapton-played-in-shropshire/

Catch more views of this famous bus at the
The Passing Show: The Life & Music of Ronnie Lane DVD documentary page
Produced and Directed by Rupert Williams and James Mackie

https://www.loudersound.com/features/ronnie-lane-s-escape-to-the-country

You Are Here:
Ronnie Lane And Slim Chance The Passing Show Tour Bus
https://www.ronnielane.com/ronnie-lane-and-slim-chance-the-passing-show-tour-bus.html

The Passing Show: The Life And Music Of Ronnie Lane
https://www.ronnielane.com/the-passing-show-the-life-and-music-of-ronnie-lane-2006-film-video-dvd.html