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Watch the making of Six O'clock

What makes a truly great driving song? A killer hook; a thumping, hot-hatch-shaking bassline; Bruce Springsteen? Last week The Sunday Times set out to record a new type of motoring anthem, with a little help from Mike Rutherford, the guitarist in Genesis, and Kenney Jones, a former drummer for the Who. And to capture the essence of the driving experience fully, these rock heavyweights would be playing instruments made entirely out of car components.

You can see the fruits of our labours above. Hopefully, you’ll agree that it’s not bad, for music played on the remains of a dismantled hatchback.

“It’s a great driving tune,” said Rutherford, who played the guitar parts on a weird-looking instrument made from a clutch plate.

“It’s a cracking number and dead catchy. You’ll find yourself humming it in the car, even if it’s not playing,” said Jones, who laid down the beat on wheels fashioned into drums.

Before going any further we should add, in the best Smashie and Nicey tradition, the exercise was all for charidee. The Teenage Cancer Trust will get all the proceeds, so if you listen to the song and like it enough to download it, please make a 79p donation (the price of one track on iTunes).

Rutherford, the mainstay of our improvised band, called Carparts, has sold more than 150m records as part of Genesis, as well as fronting Mike and the Mechanics. Jones was a founding member of Small Faces and Faces. When the Who’s original drummer, Keith Moon, was found dead, Jones took over. He also recently topped the American charts with a single from his new band, the Jones Gang.

We also recruited some of the country’s leading classical musicians, members of the National Symphony Orchestra, to play other carparts instruments including the rear-suspension spike fiddle, the fender bass and a flute made from part of a strut and some air-conditioning tubing.

All the instruments have appeared in a recent television advertisement for Ford, which features an entire orchestra playing instruments assembled from the components and body panels of a Ford Focus. They were designed by Bill Milbrodt, an American musician who began making music from bits of cars in the 1990s. He formed a New Jersey band called the Car Music Project in 2005, who were spotted by Ford’s UK advertising agency.

With his colleague Ray Faunce III, a luthier (a maker and repairer of stringed instruments), Milbrodt had just over a month to transform two brand-new Focuses into a 20-piece orchestra for the ad. “These are so much more advanced than my first attempt at carparts instruments,” he said. “And they look much better too. They’re painted with proper car paint, which costs $400-$550 a gallon.”

The vocalist for the Sunday Times’s recording was Richard Watson, who co-wrote the song. In the best tradition of talented hopefuls, he’s never had a hit or a record deal and composes in snatched moments between office meetings at a busy London recruitment agency.

InGear’s mighty supergroup assembled for the first time last Monday morning at the Farm, the Surrey recording studio set up by Rutherford in 1980. It’s where Invisible Touch, Genesis’s bestselling album, released in 1986, was recorded, as well as some of Phil Collins’s solo projects, and commemorative discs line the walls.

The first step was to get to grips with the instruments. Rutherford, a pioneer of the double-neck guitar and various Moog synthesisers, was wrestling with all four stone of the clutch-plate guitar. “This is without doubt the weirdest thing I have ever played,” he said, inspecting the welds holding the thing together. “But I guess after playing the double-neck for most of my career this is the next step. And there has always been that link between music and cars.

“I’ve actually got an eight-year-old Ford Focus at my house in Spain – I’ll never look at it in quite the same way again.”

There is no prog-rocking-out with this instrument strapped over your shoulder, however. Rutherford had to spend most of the recording session sitting on a stool with the guitar resting on a piece of sponge in his lap to stop the metal edge digging into his legs.

Jones rolled up shortly after 11am in his Jaguar XK, wearing a modish black donkey jacket and with the same fuzz of suspiciously brown hair he’s had since the 1960s. Rutherford made him a mug of instant coffee (“We’re out of the proper stuff – sorry. This is rock’n’roll”) and he began experimenting with the 16in wheel-rim drums while creating strange sounds with the assorted carparts percussion, including cogs, springs and a mixture of gears for tapping, jangling and scraping. He looked slightly bemused (although that could just be an unavoidable side effect of four decades of rock stardom).

“I saw these instruments in the ad but to be honest I presumed they were miming. I didn’t think they would actually play in tune,” he said. “I remember drumming on a guitar case for a track with Andy Fairweather Low, but that’s nothing compared with this. This is fantastic.”

The last time Jones remembers paying as much attention to the insides of a car was in one classic rock’n’roll escapade when he and the rest of the Faces were being driven down to a gig in New Orleans by a fan in a ropey old hire car. “We got really bored, so we started taking the car apart bit by bit,” he remembers. “We were stripping it out and throwing bits out of the window – the window winders, door panels, seats. By the time we’d finished there was only the steering wheel left. It was pretty early in the morning so I imagine we were hung over . . . or maybe still pissed.”

Jones and Rutherford are neighbours in Surrey’s rock-star belt, which is also home to Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and Brian May, the Queen guitarist. They have played together before at local charity bashes but this is the first time they have released a track together.

Watson began loosening up his vocal cords and sucking throat lozenges to soothe the after-effects of a bout of tonsillitis. “I know it’s unusual for the singer to be asking for autographs from other members of the band but Rutherford and Jones are two of the people I’ve admired most on the music scene,” he said. “I love Ooh La La by the Faces, I used to listen to Foxtrot and Invisible Touch [by Genesis] when I was a kid and my mum was a big fan of Small Faces in the Sixties, so this is all quite surreal.”

Watson’s song, entitled Six O’Clock in the Morning, was inspired by an obsessive ex-girlfriend who kept phoning him and, like all great road songs, looks for hope amid everyday drudgery. It was selected from a number of entries submitted to The Sunday Times and arranged for car parts by Tim Woods, a composer and music student at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.

In the sound studio, Justin Pearson, principal cellist and co-artistic director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was trying to tame the rear suspension spike fiddle, made from a shock absorber. He was using trial and error to figure out where to put his fingers and how much pressure to apply with the bow to create the right notes. Phil Todd, our flautist, had an equally difficult task to keep his instrument – essentially a piece of piping with holes in it – in tune.

The recording session was proceeding – slowly. Pearson had cracked the spike fiddle, with a little help from Rutherford in the recording studio. Although his demand to “make me sound a bit more sexy” was beyond even the several thousand knobs and buttons on the mixing desk. “You could do all this on a laptop these days,” Rutherford noted. “Although a lot of new acts are getting back into recording together as a band.”

But what really has changed is the amount of time that groups – even super ones – can spare for the recording process. “We used to come down for three months and record a record, maaan,” Rutherford said in his best mock-rock voice. “Those days are gone, which is a shame, because they were a lot of fun.”

We had just a couple of hours to complete the track. Watson was fine-tuning his “woo hoo”s and “dobedo”s and a handful of students from the Academy of Contemporary Music, in nearby Guildford, were going to help to boost the guitar and percussion sounds. By 8pm it was a wrap. We had recorded the first Sunday Times single. Just don’t expect a world tour any time soon. There are plans for some of the instruments from the session to be auctioned off in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust, plus Jones may be otherwise engaged – a source close to the band tells us there is a strong likelihood of a Faces reunion.

Additional reporting: Emma Smith

Kenney Jones, drummer with Small Faces, Faces and the Who: “I think the best driving song would have to be No Particular Place to Go by Chuck Berry. It’s a fantastic song and it starts with the line ‘Riding along in my automobile’, which is pretty ideal. It’s all about him trying to pull this bird and not being able to undo her safety belt, so to speak. I also like listening to the Eagles while I’m driving.”

Mike Rutherford, guitarist with Genesis and founder of Mike and the Mechanics: “I think it would have to be a Steely Dan track called Reelin’ in the Years. I associate it with one of the long tours we did with Genesis in the 1970s and this song was just always in the air. We used to tour in two cars, a Merc and a four-door sedan, which was quite cool at the time. I hated tour buses. I think a good driving song has to give you a bit of a lift, a bit of energy.”

Pedal to the metal: the best music for driving

Best driving songs as decided by Rolling Stone 1. Immigrant Song, Led Zeppelin (1970) 2. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen (1975) 3. Highway to Hell, AC/DC (1979) 4. Runnin’ Down a Dream, Tom Petty (1989) 5. Truckin’, Grateful Dead (1970) 6. Ol’ 55, Tom Waits (1973) 7. Radar Love, Golden Earring (1973) 8. Tush, ZZ Top (1975) 9. The Passenger, Iggy Pop (1977) 10. Wanted Dead or Alive, Bon Jovi (1986)

And the ones they missed 1. The Boys of Summer, Don Henley (1984) 2. Ace of Spades, Motörhead (1980) 3. Route 66, the Rolling Stones (1964) 4. Silver Machine, Hawkwind (1972) 5. Drift Away, Dobie Gray (1973)

To download the track click here. You will not be charged but you can follow the link to the Teenage Cancer Trust website (www.teenagecancertrust.org), where your donations will be gratefully received. Please make a minimum donation of 79p per download

Caring for teenage cancer sufferers

All proceeds from downloads of Six O’Clock in the Morning will go to the Teenage Cancer Trust. More than 2,000 teenagers are diagnosed with cancer in the UK every year, making it the most common cause of nonaccidental death in teens and young adults. More information about the trust’s work is available at www.teenagecancertrust.org, where you can also buy tickets for a series of concerts headlined by Paul Weller, the Fratellis, Muse and our very own Carparts at the Albert Hall in April.

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