Feature: Keith Moon's life in cars

'All of a sudden he just lobbed in a smoke bomb,' recalls Dougal, 'The van filled with blue smoke and they just f---ed off and left us at the lights! I thought: "Yeah! This is rock 'n' roll!" And it just got worse from then on. Or better, depending how you look at it...'

Over the next decade, as Moon established himself as rock's greatest superstar drummer and its most notorious master of destruction, Dougal became one of his closest friends.

The Bentley was Moon's first car, a one-off designed by coachbuilders Freestone and Webb for the 1950 Geneva Motor Show. Shared with bassist John Entwistle, the pair had it fitted with a Tannoy speaker behind the grille and deployed it in a series of Pythonesque practical jokes.

These typically involved cruising through Home Counties villages impersonating the local Tory candidate, warning of imminent invasions by boatloads of refugees. Or they'd pose as police hunting for escaped deadly snakes. The concealed PA gave Moon so much pleasure he installed it in his next purchase, a vast two-tone S1 Bentley converted to look like an S2.

Moon sold the S1 after running over and killing his chauffeur in 1970, an accident that haunted the drummer for the rest of his short life. The Bentley made way for a 10-year-old Rolls Royce Silver Cloud Mk III but replacing trusted driver Neil Boland was harder. When Dougal got the call his immediate thought was: 'Oh, f--k!' But, he says, they got on 'like a house on fire'.

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