The Boat that Rocked

Because it’s set in Great Britain in 1966, Pirate Radio, also known as The Boat That Rocked, inadvertently raises and unsatisfactorily answers the question What was rock and roll rebelling against if it wasn’t the Vietnam War?

Rock and roll pre-dates the anti-war movement by well over a decade---even longer, if you want to make the case that rock really began with what the blues musicians were doing in the late 40s---and for most of those years the answer to the question, What are you rebelling against? had been provided by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, What have you got?

Really, though, rock and roll wasn’t the music of rebellion or political protest---that was folk music’s job.  It was the singing of the collective hearts of millions teenagers.  It was the music of youthful high spirits and burgeoning sexuality and that’s why the grown-ups hated it.  So in a roundabout way rock became a counter-protest against parents and other authority figures protesting against rock. 

That side of things had become old hat by 1966 (See 1963's Bye, Bye Birdie, a mainstream Broadway musical that’s mainly about how square the old folks are when it comes to music and sex, and Ed Sullivan, who did not book the Beatles, the Stones, and the rest because he wanted to stick it to the Man) and it’s possible that if the War hadn’t come along rock and roll would have gone tamer sooner and what happened to it in the post-punk, MTVed 80s would have happened to it in the late 60s or early 70s.  Complete commercialization.

Actually, it more or less did happen in the early 70s.  Punk and New Wave were rebellions---against what had happened to the music.

But the US went full-tilt into Vietnam and over here rock and roll became tied to the anti-war movement and so the music became explicitly political or was interpreted as political even if the lyrics seemed to be about other things, except, you know, when it was explicitly or was interpreted to be about getting stoned or getting laid, but then getting stoned and getting laid had political implications in those days too, so it was all about the War.

Here.

Over in Britain, that didn’t happen.  Not that British kids didn’t protest the war.  They just didn’t have the same sense of…urgency.  So, I’ll ask again.  What was rock and roll rebelling against over there?

Pirate Radio’s unsatisfying answer is Kenneth Branagh.

I enjoyed Pirate Radio but I’m going to be hard pressed to find a lot of good to say about it as a movie.  As a documentation of how fine actors can take the slightest material and without putting a lot of effort into it or showing off can make you wish you could see their Hamlet or Lear---or in the case of Nick Frost, his Falstaff---it’s fun.  Kind of like being in the room when your favorite musicians strike up an impromptu rock and roll version of "You Are My Sunshine."

And as an advertisement for its own soundtrack album it’s damn near irresistible .

But as a story it’s, well, not one.  It’s a series of character sketches not so much strung as chained, heavily and ponderously, together by a theme the material just doesn’t bear.

The crew of DJs aboard the boat that rocks, a refitted freighter from which, in defiance of a law I find it hard to believe existed (Editor’s note:  But see the comments below) and out of reach of the police, they broadcast music by the Kinks, the Stones, the Hollies, the Who, and just about every other band and and singer renowned over here as stars of the British Invasion, except for the Beatles, for whose songs I assume the movie’s producers couldn’t get the rights. The DJs regard themselves as fighters in a guerrilla war against forces of repression, conformity, enforced bourgeois dullness, and the eradication of any colors from clothing except gray.

But the only representative of these forces is the character played by Branagh.

Branagh plays the gray-haired, gray-faced, gray-suited, gray-souled Sir Alistair Dormandy, a cabinet minister who has decided it’s his job to shut down the radio pirates because…because…

Well, because.  You get the feeling he’d have made it his mission to put the pirates out of business no matter what they were broadcasting, Mozart, jazz, songs me old dad sung to me around the campfire, or all-polka all the time.  Dormandy seems to hate the pirates on principle, but he never explains what that principle is.  It doesn’t appear to be moral, philosophical, religious, legal, or musical.  What it really seems to be is pathological.  Based on a scene in which he is shown rigidly enduring his own family’s Christmas celebration, you’d have to guess that what really motivates him is an aversion to fun.

And it’s not the Puritan’s aversion to fun.  A Puritan hates fun because it might cause people to forget to mind their morals and their duties to God and business.  Dormandy seems to hate fun because it might lead to messiness.  He describes a young colleague’s slightly longish and unbrushed hair as “ugly.”  To him, it’s not that order creates beauty.  Orderliness, for it’s own sake, is beauty, although he would not use the word, beauty.   It’s too emotional a word, and emotions, because they stir people up, cause disorder.  Emotions would be by his definition ugly.

No wonder he works so hard not to have any and to stamp them down in everyone he has any power stamp them down in.

It’s easy to imagine Dormandy deciding to ban funerals because grief is so ugly.

He’s like a pompous, self-important robot who has decided that it’s time for human beings stop acting so much like human beings.

Life, as he sees it, would be neater, more orderly, not beautiful, but less ugly, if he could just remove all the things that clutter it up and tend to get easily out of place.  And that’s what he goes about doing, in his job and in his personal life, eliminating disorder by removing what he sees as clutter.  He’s the ultimate minimalist.

He hates fun because when people have fun things, and emotions, get out of place, and he knows the pirates are helping people have fun, so they must be shut down before things really get messy.

This is a mania of his own.  It’s not shown that he shares it with anyone else, especially not with the people of England he’s supposedly serving.  For all we see of the rest of England---and, probably due to budgetary constraints, that’s precious little.  Almost the entire movie takes place either on the boat or in the dim, gray, anonymous interiors Dormandy makes grayer with his presence---the whole country is listening to the pirates’ radio shows and dancing ecstatically to the music.

He has the passive support of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet---an ahistorical indulgence of poetic license.  The Prime Minister at the time was Labour’s Harold Wilson and he and his government were busy liberalizing everything in sight and if there’d been a law banning the playing of rock and rock on the radio they’d have been the ones looking to rescind it.--- but the bored and distracted ministers seem to regard what he’s up to in the same way they’d regard his efforts if he was in charge of dredging the Thames or buying new uniforms for the Army.  They trust him to have identified a problem and they expect he’ll fix it now that it’s identified, because that’s what he does.  It's the sort of dull, routine task of governing they all have to do.  Beyond that, they’re not interested.

And outside of the Cabinet he has no allies in his benighted mission.  He just has two less than competent minions,  a silent and obedient secretary of the if only she’d take off her glasses and let down her hair sort who seems baffled and vaguely annoyed that no one is offering to remove her glasses and let down her hair for her (Sinead Matthews) and who secretly listens to Pirate Radio when she’s alone at her desk, and a single henchman, a self-castrated careerist named, too humorously, Twatt, (Jack Davenport) who is motivated at first by opportunism and then by fear of losing his job.  Twatt has no opinion on the music it’s his job to silence and he manages only a pale and impotent anger, more of a sullen irritation, really, towards the crew of Pirate Radio and that has nothing to do with what they stand for, just what they stand in the way of---his career advancement.  The music business itself is full of such characters.

Dormandy, when all’s said and done, is a solitary and unique character.  He’s a grotesque, a type but not typical and because of that he doesn’t represent anything or anybody but himself.  You can’t build a protest movement around a rebellion against a single person’s grotesqueries.  Although it’s to be hoped that his daughter and his secretary stand up to him sooner rather than later, he isn’t somebody the DJs need to give much thought to, and they don’t.

They don’t even know he exists.  They feel the effects of his efforts to put them out of business---well, of Twatt’s efforts on his behalf---but as annoyances more than as blows struck in a fight for the country’s collective soul, and they thwart Dormandy and Twatt easily, at every turn.

Still, they believe the music they play is important for reasons beyond having a great beat and you can dance to it, and they think of themselves as heroes and rebels and leaders in a cultural guerrilla war.  (Actually, they’re a bit self-important in this.  Although they love the music, they don’t seem to know that they aren’t the ones making it, that there are real artists at work creating it.  I can only recall two times when any of them mentions a musician by name in connection with his or her talent.)  And the movie seems to want us to see them this way.

The trouble is it provides no context in which to do so.  Not only is England largely absent from Pirate Radio, so are the 60s.  There are no juxtapositions with television and movies and news clips from the times.  There are no Zelig- or Forrest Gump-esque moments when one of the characters steps into the midst of actual events or meets up with a real person.  A scene of one of them having to take his own measure against the likes of Mick Jagger or Ray Davies would have been interesting.  Nobody talks about what’s happening in the world beyond the boat.  The British Commonwealth was sending troops to Vietnam at the time but there’s only a single reference to the war and it’s offhand, the basis of a metaphor, and used to set-up a joke.

And the music itself doesn’t evoke the period because it’s all too good.  It’s all stuff that has lasted.  The DJs spin records that I was spinning when I was a DJ in college and that I listened to in grad school along with the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, and the Clash.  A lot of those bands were still recording.  The Stones still are.  For all the difference it made to me, the two Elvises were contemporaries and as far as any nostalgia the soundtrack brought out in me, it was nostalgia for my own glory days in the 80s.  I suspect it would have a similar effect on my eighteen year old niece. (Violet Mannion, by the way, is her high school’s foremost authority on all things Beatles.)  This music gets played at everybody’s proms and weddings.

You don’t conjure up the 60s by playing Dusty Springfield singing "You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me" because that song is still breaking hearts.

So, I ask again, what was the point?

Meanwhile…some fun and funny scenes, some fine ensemble acting anchored by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Rhys Ifrans, Nick Frost, and Bill Nighy, and you can’t go wrong with those guys in your cast, and, of course, great music.

Far from a great movie, but it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.

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Pirate Radio, written and directed by Richard Curtis. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Nick Frost, Rhys Ifrans, Charlie Rowe, Chris O'Dowd, Jack Davenport, Emma Thompson, January Jones, and Kenneth Branagh. Rated R. Available on DVD and to watch instantly at Amazon.

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This ought to make a mess of your emotions:

Comments

[Jennifer]

I was just listening to some Dusty yesterday. She must be in the air.

[Madeline Meyers]

Haven't read your whole piece yet but had to immediately jump in and tell you that the law did indeed exist. The only radio we had back then was BBC....which only played classical, Frank Sinatra and Mantovani. In order to listen to Rock and Roll we had to find other means. Radio Luxembourg was big during my teenage years and the pirate radio ships followed.

Ok...back to reading the rest.

[Madeline Meyers]

"his job to shut down the radio pirates because…because…"

Because any radio besides BBC was against the law. BBC radio and TV were funded by a tax and were commercial free.

[Madeline Meyers]

The point was...... BBC owned the airwaves lock stock and barrel. It wasn't about WHAT Pirate Radio played it was about the fact that they were operating outside the law and in doing so hoped to change the law...which they eventually did.

I guess this must all seem strange to Americans who were brought up seeing "sponsors" for absolutely everything...which I found exceedingly strange when I moved here in 1965....but thems the facts.

[actor212]

Pirate radio in the 50s and 60s in the UK existed for one reason and one reason only: European youth (not just UK youth) couldn't get American rhythm and blues except for one hour a week on a Belgian (might have bene out of Luxembourg) station.

Radio was basically state run. The Beeb refused to play anything more modern than skiffle.

(Oh. I see from Maddy's post that it was Luxembourg)

Indeed, had the Beeb played rock and/or roll, bands like the Beatles, the Stones and the Kinks might not have come about.

You see, part of rock's charm then was the fact that it was not sanctioned, that it was therefore put on a par with pornography and sex in the eyes of the sate-run stations. It became rebellious not because Elvis did anything earth shattering (to the ear, at any rate) but because teens were offered the opportunity to take a music form and tailor it to their fantasies and imaginations.

[Fairfax]

This issue is pretty complicated, and I believe everything posted so far in this thread is accurate. From my reading of several books detailing the career of the Beatles, I believe the following is also true.

The supposed ban on rock n' roll was, in large part, a ban on playing recorded music that was in the contracts the musicians union had with the BBC. It was believed by the union that if there were more programs devoted to playing records, there would be fewer jobs for its members, so there was a prohibition against playing more than a limited amount of records on the BBC. However, rock n' roll bands (and presumably other acts considered more in the mainstream) did frequently perform live in various BBC studios, and these shows were broadcast nationally and regionally. The collection of Beatles performances available on CD gives us a taste of what the band actually sounded like in the live performances they were doing as they rose to worldwide fame. In fact, for most of us it's the only way we have of knowing what they were like before they became a commodity.

I'd also add that in Britain in the late 50s and early 60s, rock n' roll was associated with youth violence, even more than it was in this country. Several shows featuring American artists in this period were stopped by rampaging youths who took over the stage, smashed all the equipment they could get their hands on, and vandalized the theatres. Even Labour politicians would have been in favor of banning anything associated with Teddy Boys, Mods, Rockers, etc.

BTW, I thought this movie was horrible. PS Hoffman seemed to be asleep through most of it (I assume they digitized pupils on his eyelids to hide this fact), Bill Nighy gave us a less interesting version of his standard performance, and Brannagh was simply awful. The script seemed to have been a mish-mash of 5 or 6 different treatments of the theme, and anybody who ended up in the drink in the North Sea in January would probably have died within a few minutes, either from hypothermia or drowning due to the inability to move one's limbs.

[Bill Altreuter]

The movie Quadraphonia is actually a pretty good depiction of youth culture in the UK during the time in question, although I certainly couldn't tell you how historically accurate it is. Pop music is frequently targeted to youth-- they are its principle consumers, so why not? Youth stands in constant opposition to what has gone before, so styles and tastes in music change. Remember the library scene in High Society? "Don't dig that kind of crooning, chum." Or have a look at a old copy of Downbeat, where the war between the fans of swing (the 'moldy figs') and the bebopers waged. Heck, Punk and New Wave were responses to the Journey records that preceded.

I am inclined to believe that tying rock'n'roll to Vietnam is overstating it more than a little. You could make a list of rock songs from that period with an anti-war text (or subtext-- Last Train To Clarkville anyone?) and be hard pressed to find many that were much good. The only Neil Yong song that is more annoying than Ohio is Southern Man, e.g.. I'm not so sure there is a Dylan song about Vietnam, per se. The only thing by the Stones that seems to come close is You Can't Always Get What You Want ("I went down to the demonstration...").

[shaun]

"Pirate Radio" is in my Netflix queue so I cannot comment on its degree of badness just yet, but I will take a swipe at your introductory remarks about rock 'n' roll.

You are right as far as you go, but as a student of the history of jazz specifically and 20th century American music generally, I take a more nuanced view. Throughout the century, one musical genre superseded another -- ever building on what came before and laying the groundwork for what came next. In this manner, rock has kept reinventing itself, although this old fogey would argue that the Fifties and Sixties remain the richest period.

[Lance]

Shaun, swipe away. One of the reasons I blog is to get stuff explained to me. I should have phrased more of my remarks in the form of questions since I really don't know much about the history. At the time I thought of rock and roll as music for girls, because the only fans I knew were my friends big sisters.

Madeline, actor, Fairfax, and Bill, thanks for the info and the background. Very little of that is in the movie and as I said, without any context, Branagh's character comes across as a solitary monster and the DJs as a seafaring version of the Merry Pranksters without the hostility and the acid trips.

[Kevin Hayden]

Adding on to the great commentary in this thread: Liverpool (the Beatles)was a blue-collar city, sorta 'the hood' with a fair amount of working toughs.

By 1966, though rock 'n roll was just getting to its ties to drug culture, it was already tied to the notion that it came from Blacks, so there was likely an element of race rebellion tied to it, even in GB.

While pirate radio was clearly about choice, and rebelling against the medium and culture of 'control' the BBC represented, here in the states, a similar thing was underway with underground radio, which was a scattered group of FM stations directly challenging FCC control, which was tight against bad language, overt sexual references and drug references. Underground was not as likely to get shut down, but plenty of fines and fights resulted. And ultimately, all were commercialized.

So if a larger theme can be ascribed to the times, larger than Vietnam and international in scope, it was resistance to control. Dormandy responded, not just out of 'fun aversion', but as any control freak does: trying to control more the more they're losing control. Mid-level bureaucrats often are similar, taking their role so seriously that they can't imagine any other perspective. Lost control means one thing only: failure.

I still appreciated your take on the movie. It sounds like many music documentaries: no complete plot, but a fair amount of good music and a little good acting.

Of all the comments, I can't agree with Bill's assertion about a dearth of anti-war songs. For many teens, figuring out genres wasn't important. A station playing rock was often playing at least blues, R&B and folk mixed in, and in a normal day, we'd hear dozens of protest songs, many of them good, though maybe not to a music purist.

Among the bands that contributed: CSN (with and without Young), Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, Grand Funk Railroad, Quicksilver, Steve Goodman, John Prine, Peter, Paul & Mary, Baez, Steppenwolf, Chicago, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, The Beatles, John Lennon, Edwin Starr, Phil Ochs, Marvin Gaye, Arlo Guthrie, Donovan, The Byrds, Barry McGure, Creedence, The MC5, Stevie Wonder, Country Joe & the Fish, The Fugs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, The Animals, Canned Heat, The Doors, The Temptations, Patti Smith, Arlo Guthrie and likely some more I've forgotten.

Also, the Rolling Stones 'Gimme Shelter' was an excellent anti-Vietnam War song. Bill's right in that Dylan never wrote one specifically about Vietnam, as Dylan leaned to larger, universal anti-war themes in Masters of War and Blowing In The Wind.

All the songs weren't great music but some were emotionally intense such as one he mentions 'Ohio' or 'For What It's Worth' by Buffalo Springfield or the in-your-face of 'We Can Be Together' by Jefferson Airplane. And I'd certainly rank Gimme Shelter, Alice's Restaurant, Imagine, What's Going On, It Better End Soon, Who'll Stop The Rain? and others as very memorable, high quality music.

[eric k]

Kevin,

How could you bring up CCR and not add Fortunate Son

[actor212]

Kevin reminds me that Wolfman Jack had to move his studios to Mexico to avoid US regulations. albeit those were technical spec regs (XERB broadcast at 250,000 watts, which is five times the legal limit for a States station).

[cschack]

I saw this last year and was really disappointed. I'm sure they all had fun, because it comes over like they did, but still…such a stellar cast with so little to do? It just sort of floats along, with very little conflict and the same damn soundtrack as every other feelgood 60s movie. Don't get me wrong, they're great songs, but there should be a clause that says these movies have to find at least one halfway obscure tune in the Rhino back catalog. I dunno, it was an aggressively OK ninety minutes, but only because the cast was so utterly fantastic that they could get away with just being charming. The only interesting bit was the gay subplot, which is hinted at, then sort of disappears. There's a good movie to be made about pirate radio, and I really hope it gets made.

[Bill Altreuter]

I feel as though I should try to rebut the points Kevin argues. First, how many of the artists on his list made music that he (or anyone else) still listens to? Who has Grand Funk on their iPod? (And what is the anti-war song that Grand Funk is supposed to have performed? T.N.U.C.?) Second, I would put it to you that the anti-war numbers that all of these artists recorded were their weakest material-- although I might carve out an exception for "Wooden Ships".
Third, Goodman, Prine, Peter, Paul & Mary, The Fugs, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and Buffy Sainte-Marie are not really rock artists. Prine excepted they were working out of the folk tradition; they were mostly active during the folk revival which had mostly run out of steam by 1964. They don't really have a place in this discussion. Even if we include them the reality is here and now, in the 21st Century, we don't go home and listen to their anti-war stuff. We play "Diamonds & Rust" or "Leaving on a Jet Plane", or "Illegal Smile".

Fourth, Patti Smith released her first record (Hey Joe b/w Piss Factory) in 1974. "Horses" was released the following year. (I remember because I bought it the week it came out.) Although she is an age contemporary of some of the others on Kevin's list she is probably not properly a part of this discussion.

My point, I guess, is that although rock'n'roll has a political dimension, when the politics take over the artistry suffers. "For What It's Worth" is interesting as a subjective statement of alienation. Like "Street Fighting Man" its value is as a kind of documentary. The difference is that "Street Fighting Man" has a good beat, and you can dance to it.