Bill Nighy's journey to mid-'60s England began in, of all places, mid-'60s England. As a teen, he left home for Paris to write, came back unwritten, then became an actor, later to play a key (imaginary) figure in the very music that transformed him as a youth. But let's start with Bill the Mod.
"Mods loved black American music: Stax, Atlantic and Tamla Motown," says the actor in a quiet, cultured voice at a table at L'Ermitage. "You had a half-inch all-over haircut. You wore Ravel loafers and trousers of the cigarette type but slightly too short, and I regret to say this, and I'm embarrassed and ashamed, but with . . . colored socks."
The Nighy of Now, looking sensibly chic in a black suit and, one presumes, black socks, has teamed with writer-director Richard Curtis for a third go-round, this time for "Pirate Radio." The new comedy concerns the British empire's virtual radio blackout in the '60s of the Stones, the Who and their ilk, birthing a rebel alliance of offshore rock 'n' roll stations, many on ships anchored in the international waters of the North Sea.
"They were still playing your parents' music, which was basically people in evening dress, standing very still, singing about the stars. Within about three years, you had Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar," Nighy says, still relishing the revolution.
Nighy's character Quentin is the owner of one such rocking boat, King Bee to a hive of DJs played by the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans and Rhys Darby (the last known for "Flight of the Conchords").
"I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script. But we speculated, Richard and I, that with a name like Quentin, if you're English, unless your parents are deeply eccentric, it probably means you are what they used to call 'high born.' In other words, from an old, established British family. And he's almost certainly the black sheep -- just wearing those clothes would isolate him. We speculated perhaps he stole a Canaletto or a Rembrandt from the family's stately home to buy the boat. He's got a few quid from somewhere. He wouldn't think of it as stealing; he'd think of it as part of his heritage."
And with that, he'd have launched his outlaw station. "Twenty-two million people tuned in every day. So that was basically everyone under 30. And the government did this cool thing and made it illegal. You got outlaw status just by tuning in."
