Richard Curtis blew up big after his directorial debut with Love Actually in 2003. And then for five years, we never heard from him. Well, there was that Bridget Jones movie for which he wrote the screenplay, but that barely made any noise.

Now according to British film production company, Working Title Films, Curtis is immersed in the deep end of the company’s next project, The Boat That Rocked, due out in May 2009.

Written and directed by Curtis, The Boat That Rocked recalls the glory days of rock and roll in the UK: the sixties. Set in the same time period as the LSD-infused summer of love, the movie celebrates the rebellious pirate radio movement that had moptop-sporting blokes and mini-skirt-clad birds swearing by it.

To the Parliament, tunes of the rock persuasion was a favorite scapegoat for everything that was culturally wrong in the sixties. They blamed rock and roll for the moral and cultural decline of its pubescent juveniles. And when a law was passed, restricting the kind of music radio stations could play, the DJs were peeved. Exploiting a legal loophole, these disc-jockeying iconoclasts took their equipment, moved into ships and intruded into the airwaves, blaring the kind of punkish, noisy music that fans craved. The film follows one such DJ collective - their tunes, their boat, their antics, and their brush with law enforcers.

The line-up includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, Nick Frost, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, all currently put up at Dorsetshire, where filming is taking place in a fishing trawler. What can go wrong with Hoffman, Nighy, and the adorable - in a non-gay way - Frost playing rock and roll martyrs?