In the UK, motoring and youth culture are intrinsically intertwined. The car is a symbol of aspiration that equals freedom and British youths have expressed their freedom by customising cars since the dawn of the teenager.
​“Midnight Express is LAW’s love letter to UK modified car culture and everyone who has ever dreamed of owning a blazing chariot of their own,” states LAW Founder John Holt. ​“The film captures the inimitable adrenaline surge of sitting in the back of your older brother’s SR Nova and hurtling through the streets into the night, with Nicky Blackmarket reverberating from the 6x9s.”
Directed by documentary filmmaker and long-time LAW collaborator Joe Wilson, the three-minute, full-throttle film presents a series of vignettes that provide a glimpse into the UK’s modified car scene. ​“Midnight Express is a visual album full of the moments that can only exist thanks to both the confines and endless possibilities of cars,” explains Wilson. ​“It celebrates the communities that are born from a shared love of all things automobile and the individuals who continue to push car modification to the limit – transforming mass-produced objects into one-of-a-kind head turners.”
The film follows Jay and a group of BMW E30 enthusiasts from Hitchin to ​‘The Takeover Cruise’ in Harlow, a raucous midnight mass for devotees of BPM and BHP on London’s liminal outskirts. Back-seat riders emulate the intimate passages of time spent static in carparks and lay-bys, whilst school-age arcade racers learn to negotiate corners long before their L-plates. Chrome exhausts are elevated into gleaming Gran Turismo car parts and Seat Ibiza badges allude to the euphoria of a distant paradise.