Tim Pope Memoir Recounts Prawn Mercury, Weinstein Fallout
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Tim Pope published memoir "I Shoot Rock Stars" with a foreword by the Cure's Robert Smith, recounting 37 videos for the Cure including "Close to Me" (band locked in a wardrobe and thrown off a cliff), "Lullaby" (snakes, asphyxiation, a giant spider's mouth), and the clandestinely filmed "The Lovecats" shot in an estate agent's house
- Tim Pope dressed Freddie Mercury as a "giant Mediterranean prawn" for Queen's "It's a Hard Life"—which drummer Roger Taylor said made Mercury look sillier than any artist ever had on video—and left Neil Young with a "raging dent in his forehead like a third eye" while filming "Pressure"
- Tim Pope was recruited by Harvey Weinstein to direct the sequel to "The Crow," a film in which Brandon Lee had died; Pope describes Weinstein telling him "We own you" and calls the experience brutal, after which he made no videos for 12 years and no films for 25
- Tim Pope began writing the memoir after finding a years-old answerphone message from David Bowie, who died in 2016, saying "It was like David was speaking to me from beyond the grave, because I never said goodbye to him"
- Tim Pope rejected MTV's early "thou shalts"—Spandex and babes with big hair—in favor of "defiant individualism," filming Soft Cell amid chains, raw meat and maggots for "Sex Dwarf," which police confiscated, and dressing Paul Weller in lipstick for the Style Council
- Tim Pope argues the golden age of video ended when MTV dropped "Music Television" from its logo in 2010; he is currently casting a film called "The Photographer's Assistant" and assembling a 50th-anniversary documentary about the Cure
Why it matters: Pope's memoir adds another Weinstein-era testimony to the post-2017 reckoning, with the director explicitly stating he worked with Weinstein 'before we knew about wanking into flowerpots and destroying women's lives.' For music history, it is a primary-source window onto MTV's golden age from a director whose 'bespoke tailor' approach shaped iconic visuals for the Cure, Bowie, and Queen.
