Richard Curtis made his career in romantic comedies: Four Weddings; Notting Hill; Love, Actuallyand Bridget Jones. His latest movie, The Boat That Rocks, is a romp through the heyday of pirate radio.

LAST YEAR when the Sunday Telegraph compiled its list of “the 100 most powerful people in British culture” Richard Curtis was ranked 12th. Mention of this causes him to squirm. “That’s a very puzzling idea, isn’t it?” he says. “I don’t feel that at all. I’ve got such a slow-motion film career because I make them so rarely.”

What's undeniable is that Curtis has demonstrated an unfailing connection with the pulse of popular culture since the early 1980s, when he and Rowan Atkinson, a friend from their days at Oxford, collaborated on the scripts for the long-running Blackaddertelevision series and then the even more popular Mr Beanseries and its two lucrative spin-off movies.

Curtis went on to write the hit romantic comedies Four Weddings and a Funeraland Notting Hill. He teamed with another Oxford friend, Helen Fielding, on the two films drawn from her Bridget Jonesbooks. He turned film director with Love, Actuallyand follows it with The Boat That Rocked.

While his screenplays are predominantly about love, actually, his new movie addresses his first love, pop music.

“That’s true,” he says, “and it’s not diminishing. In fact, it’s reinvigorated because of my children. I have a 13-year-old daughter and she’s very keen on Taylor Swift, who writes her own songs. I told her that if she likes Taylor Swift, she should listen to Katie and Annie McGarrigle, and to Linda Ronstadt. I’m getting swirled back into it.

"The top 10 matters less today, but there's some good new material. There's an unbelievably good song on the new Bruce Springsteen album – Kingdom of Days, about being in love with someone when you're 50, not when you're 15."

We talked in Dublin on Wednesday afternoon, shortly before the Irish premiere of The Boat That Rocked, which celebrates the pirate radio DJs who broadcast off the coast of England in the mid-1960s. The apt venue for the post-premiere party was a boat on the Liffey, but the venue was salubrious compared to the working conditions of the pioneering pirates of Radio Caroline at a time when pop music was served in meagre rations on the BBC.

“That seems very weird now,” Curtis says. “The more you think about the 1960s, the more you realise how much it was like the 1950s. In England we were still living in a post-war period. I got a shock the other day when I realised that the gap between the birth of my younger son and the release of Sgt Pepper was the same as the gap between my birth and the beginning of the first World War. That’s how close we were to the past.”

The movie illustrates the liberating force of popular music during the bleak period when it’s set. “Music still does that for me,” says Curtis. “When I’m in a bad mood, I put on a good song and that cheers me up. I’ve realised that the film is also about the best days of all our lives, which is from 20 and 25 when all your friends seem to have very iconic status before they’re in pairs, and everybody loves music and goes to concerts.”

Now 52, Curtis spent his childhood in different countries because of his father’s work with Unilever. He was born in New Zealand, moved to Manila and discovered the pleasures of pop music when he was seven and the family relocated to Sweden.

"My first memory is of babysitters coming in and bringing their box of singles. They would take off the Nat King Cole record my parents were playing and put on The Supremes. Actually, there was quite a lively pop music scene in Sweden at the time. I've got a single by the Hepstars, which featured Benny from Abba, and another single by the Hootenanny Singers when Björn was with them. And I was obsessed with a group called Ola and the Janglers, who did a brilliant cover of Johnny Tillotson's Poetry in Motion."

Curtis went to boarding school in England at the age of 11, going on to become head boy at Harrow, even though he admits he "used to not go to chapel sometimes" so he could listen to the weekly chart show, Pick of the Pops. "I still have an incredibly clear memory of hearing it on the Sunday when the Four Tops went from number 16 straight to number one with Reach Out, I'll Be There."

His screenplay for The Boat That Rockedcues a soundtrack awash with mid-1960s pop classics, enough to fill the accompanying 40-track CD, and what are often dismissed as music video sequences in movies arise organically from the narrative in his film. "There can be a weird magic that happens when you put a piece of music next to scenes," Curtis says.

"Sometimes you can't believe how well it fits. That happened when we put Lazy Sundayagainst the stag night in the film. We had done the cut using another song, but Lazy Sundayworked so much better. We often tried as many as 10 songs against a particular scene, but sometimes my favourite songs, such as Chris Farlowe's Out of Time, just didn't fit."

While most of the songs in the movie were big hit singles, the soundtrack refreshingly includes less obvious tracks such as All Over the Worldby Françoise Hardy, Crimson and Cloverby Tommy James and the Shondells, and, most effectively, Lorraine Ellison's still spine-tingling Stay With Me Baby, lipsynched by the lovelorn DJ played by Chris O'Dowd.

Arranging clearances for all the songs Curtis wanted for the film was a complicated process and sometimes prohibitively expensive. "I chose For What It's Worthby Buffalo Springfield, but they decided not to licence it because it's been used so often," he says. "There were a few songs where the performers didn't make any money from them and they had re-recorded soundalikes, which we wouldn't use because we only wanted the originals. And some were absurdly expensive. They wanted $1.4 million for Break on Through by the Doors, which we didn't have to spend."

Donning my pedant's anorak, I note that Curtis has taken some dramatic licence by including some songs not released until after the movie's 1966-67 setting, such as Father and Son, This Guy's in Love with Youand Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)."That's fair enough, I deserve that," Curtis responds. "As you go through a film with that many songs on it, it becomes increasingly hard to raise the stakes."

He cites the music video for Fionn Regan's Be Good or Be Goneas his inspiration for the many reaction shots of pirate radio fans interspersed throughout the movie. "It's a brilliant video. He's just singing the song, but in 20 different places, and they haven't interfered with the sound. So when he's in a bird shop, you can hear the birds, and when he's in a library, a woman tells him to stop singing. In three minutes you get to see so much of Ireland. So I decided to have a locked camera in 50 different places for the fan shots and you get a sense of the country in little fragments."

Music references turn up in the most unlikely places in Curtis screenplays, as when Hugh Grant tells Andie McDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral: "In the words of David Cassidy, when he was still with the Partridge Family, I think I love you." Curtis says, "For me the big surprise, and it wouldn't be a surprise to me now, was when Andie McDowell says 'As John Lennon said, love is the answer, you know that for sure', and we had to pay £500 just to quote that line. Maybe she should have said 'money's the answer'."

The unanticipated international success of Four Weddings did wonders for the sales of Wet Wet Wet and WH Auden, and propelled Curtis's film career, although he continued to work in television, devising and writing The Vicar of Dibleyand working on Comic Relief, which he initiated with Dawn French and Lenny Henry in 1986.

In his screenplays, Curtis has shown a remarkable flair for establishing, juggling and connecting a multiplicity of diverse characters, rather than concentrating on a few protagonists and relegating other characters to the periphery.

“I learned a lot from Mike Newell when he directed Four Weddings,” he says. “There was a genuine possibility that it would come across just as a sketch film. He kept saying that every character had to have a 360-degree story. That gave me the confidence to spend more time on developing what might have been supporting characters.”

Broadcaster Emma Freud, who is married to Curtis, is the sounding board for all his screenplay ideas and she’s a tough critic, he says. “Oh, yes, and very argumentative and at length. If she doesn’t like something originally, she will try and get it cut, and if it’s still there then right at the end of the edit, she’ll still be talking about it.”

The Boat That Rockedgoes on general release from Wednesday

Hang the DJ: jockeys in the movies

Richard Curtis secured " the best actor in the world" for The Boat That Rockedwhen Philip Seymour Hoffmanagreed to play the US DJ loosely modelled on star Radio Caroline presenter Emperor Rosko. "After you spend a week with him doing the part, you think he is that character," Curtis says of Hoffman.

Hoffman's predecessors as screen DJs most notably included Clint Eastwoodwhose perfectly mellow tones as a late-night presenter in Play Misty for Me(1971) attracted an obsessive stalker fan. In complete contrast was the unrestrained exuberance of the irreverent DJ played by Robin Williamsin Good Morning, Vietnam(1987).

Paul Kayechewed the scenery as a hedonistic Ibiza club DJ losing his hearing in the mockumentary It's All Gone Pete Tong(2004). Don Cheadlepersuasively portrayed Peter Green, a prison DJ who became a Washington DC radio star in the factually based Talk to Me(2007).

Tim McIntirewas ideally cast as pioneering DJ Alan Freed who paid the price for payola in the undervalued American Hot Wax(1978).

Howard Sternplayed a version of himself in Private Parts(1997), which followed his ratings rise from DJ to shock-jock. Legendary DJ Wolfman Jackcued the terrific soundtrack of American Graffiti(1973), the movie breakthrough for George Lucas pre-Star Wars.

Revered presenter John Peelwas aptly cast as a laconic DJ in the rarely seen Five Seconds to Spare(1999). Alan Freeman, the sonorous voice of Pick of the Pops for decades, turned up as a DJ in Just for Fun(1963) and again in Sebastian(1968). And Emperor Roskohimself joined fellow Radio Caroline presenter Tommy Vanceas DJs in the curio that was Slade in Flame(1975).