In my favorite episode of The
Sopranos Tony is in what for him passes for a sad, almost weepy mood late
one late driving his tank like SUV across his toxic little slice of New Jersey –
when suddenly the car radio chimes out, “CBS-FM” and then plays a song from his
wayward youth.
The music doesn’t so much soothe
the beast in Tony but rather convinces him that he should punish a guy on his
payroll, a corrupt politician, who is at that precise moment sleeping with
Tony’s estranged Russian ex-girlfriend.
The notion that music on the radio
can actually have an impact on your life seems horribly old fashioned in a day
when young folks robotically tune into their ten thousand song play lists on
their iPods. A new movie out from the writer of the gay friendly British comedy
Four Weddings and Funeral gloriously recalls a time when rock ‘n roll
did actually signify a not so quiet revolution against all the stuffy WWII era
conventions that hung on into the not yet swinging sixties like bread mold.
|
|
Writer/director Richard Curtis
explains that his comedy Pirate Radio -- with its lesbian ship’s cook
and team of eccentric and sometimes quite randy male disc jockeys -- is loosely
based on the adventures of the free booting broadcast pioneers who gave a pop
starved British public a taste of the era’s best rock music. Curtis says the
film with its fifty-six tune soundtrack – from the Who’s My Generation to
Cream’s I Feel Free – recalled nights when his own eleven-year-old
school boy self was suffering a pitiful exile “at a pretty tough bordering
school in England. Every night when I went to bed, under my pillow there would
be a tiny little transistor radio broadcasting this extraordinary world of
freedom.
|
|
“There was very little pop music on
official radio, because all radio stations were run by the BBC. America had the
luxury of five hundred commercial stations and we had zero. So what happened was
there were these boats that some very rogue like guys sent out into the middle
of the sea, just outside of British territorial waters, and they started
broadcasting rock ‘n roll twenty-four hours a day.”
|
|
Ever so loosely based on the real
life Radio Caroline – so named because its founder loved seeing photos of tiny
Caroline Kennedy disrupting her daddy’s meetings with grownups in the Oval
Office – Pirate Radio features a talented crew headed up by Philip
Seymour Hoffman as the mysterious American DJ, nicknamed “The Count.” Hoffman –
who in some ways is reprising his witty turn as rock critic Lester Bangs from
Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical masterwork Almost Famous – free-forms
in a wild and witty style that pays tribute to notable AM DJ’s from Wolf man
Jack to madman Joey Reynolds to the rapier, layered humor of WABC’s legendary
Big Dan Ingram.
|
|
Curtis cuts frequently from the air
studio to the below decks area where as the movie’s R rating warns “some sexual
content including brief nudity” rules the roost. The sexual content is fleshed
out by the devilishly cute Tom Sturridge as the horny young Carl, fresh out of
boarding school with a longing to banish his virginity and also discover his
biological dad, who his flirty mom has hinted may lurk among the crew.
|
|
Curtis says one of his dilemmas
writing the script came from his realization that it was actually a left wing Labour
Party government that finally pulled the plug on the radio pirates. “I kind of
couldn’t make that work imaginatively, so I just depicted them as old
fashioned. As matter of fact the man who banned it was Tony Benn, who was a
famously left-wing person who recently justified it by invoking the old
argument that pop music is an opiate (for the masses) and the young people had
the illusion that they were revolting when actually they were being conned and
what they should have been doing was concentrating on the War in Vietnam and
social justice.”
|
|
Curtis notes that four months after
the pirates were taken off the air, the government set up Radio One “which was
a pop music station featuring many of the DJ’s from the glory years of pirate
radio. And then six years later proper commercial radio was ushered in.” Curtis
chuckles over the irony that Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s government
was probably defeated in 1970 by remnants of the pirate radio movement. “He may
have paid a heavy price for trying to kill rock ‘n roll.”
Richard Curtis fondly recalls his
earlier heyday as the screenwriter for Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and A
Funeral in which the then openly gay Simon Callow nabbed a big supporting
role.
“We were just starting to cast the
role Simon eventually played when he was interviewed by the Radio Times and
claimed to have been picked for the part. And Mike Newell was too nice a man to
say no – so in fact Simon got the part without auditioning for it. Of course he
turned out to be absolutely perfect for it.”