Rock the boat, don't rock the boat baby...

Say what you want – the fact of the matter is that The Boat That Rocked is cool!

Not only is it cool – colossally cool – but it’s also got a monumental soundtrack – The Kinks, The Stones, The Who, The Hollies, The Troggs, The Tremeloes The Beach Boys, not to mention Jeff Beck, Jimi, Otis, Cat, Bowie and even Smokey and a few of his miracles! Wow. Just…wow!

Add it to a mix of Bill Nighy revelling in his devilishly delectable rebellious side that, let’s face it, we all know he explored to the full when he was in his early twenties; Phillip Seymour Hoffman rocking his way through what was, without doubt, the coolest decade in history with his own inimitable dose of  ‘here I am – come and get me’ attitude all the while basking in the freedom of The Count’s ‘give a f**k’ swagger; and finish it off by bringing Nick Frost, Rhys Ifans, Rhys Darby and Chris O’Dowd on board and you’ve got what has to be one of Rich Curtis’ quintessentially cool collections of film rock stars we’ve seen since, well…since 1966!

The boat is at sea in a wash of wild women, wilder nights and, at risk of sounding clichéd – some genuinely rocking tunes! But for me, the music is (dare I say it??) secondary to one other theme which I’ve already paid lip service to, but now let me focus in more detail - the swagger in this film is astounding.

The girls are wilder than the seas of the pacific, The Count couldn’t care less for common conformities, and between them, Rhys Ifans’ Gavin Kavanagh and Nighy’s Quentin have never even contemplated spending a minute doing something that wasn’t for themselves (or for a girl…which I guess could be said to be for themselves anyway…bah, bl**dy semantics!)…it’s a case of “We’re here, you’re there, and let’s have a ****** good time with whatever’s in the middle!”

And I think about this…wouldn’t it be liberating, just once, to live even just a day with the same surly swagger these rock Gods of the airwaves lived their entire lives?? Just imagine that for a day, you said what you thought; you did what you wanted; you went where you wished and didn’t have to think about tomorrow…isn’t that an intoxicating idea??

Well, it is what it is, but whenever I watch these guys rocking out, I get a surge – a need to bask in personal conviction!

So from now on, I think I’ll do just that. I think I’ll drink what I want to drink, I’ll smoke what I want to smoke, I’ll say what I want to say and I’ll shout what I want to shout…and I’ll do it with all the sumptuous style and swagger of nineteensixtysix!