The Boat That Rocked (2009)
Richard Curtis’ exuberant comedy about the rise and fall of Pirate Radio in the sixties – as you might expect – has quite a few brilliant songs featured in it. This psychedelic soundtrack features the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix and is incredibly (for want of a better word) groovy. The music is what grounds the film’s plot of liberated DJ’s, led by the much missed Philip Seymour Hoffman, fighting against the hard-nosed British establishment using only their library of records and a punk cavalier attitude.
This film is essentially a celebration of the pop industry and of the radio stations that still exist and broadcast every genre of music today, in a context that is both funny and heart-warming. ‘All Day and All of the Night’ by The Kinks from the film’s opening sequence, encapsulates the free-spirited delight that music brings not only to the characters of the film, but surely to everybody else too.