Tim Pope Recalls Torturing Rock Stars in Iconic Music Videos
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- Tim Pope has published 'I Shoot Rock Stars,' a memoir with a foreword by Cure frontman Robert Smith that catalogs decades of putting musicians in dangerous or uncomfortable situations on set.
- Pope directed 37 videos for the Cure, including 'Lullaby' (where he ran a camera inside Robert Smith's mouth), 'Close to Me' (the band locked in a wardrobe that was then thrown off a cliff), and 'The Lovecats' (shot clandestinely in a house whose keys Pope obtained from an estate agent's window).
- Pope earned Roger Taylor's verdict that 'no artist has ever looked as silly in a video' for dressing Freddie Mercury as a 'giant Mediterranean prawn' in Queen's 'It's a Hard Life,' and once left Neil Young with a 'raging dent in his forehead like a third eye' while filming closely for a piano-shot video.
- Pope was recruited by Harvey Weinstein to direct the 'The Crow' sequel, an experience he calls 'brutal' and says left him with 'mental scars'; he did not make another music video for 12 years or another film for 25 years afterward.
- Pope launched his directing career in the early 1980s by smuggling an 8mm camera 'down his trousers' into an Emerson, Lake and Palmer concert, then broke through directing Soft Cell's 'Bedsitter' after their 'Tainted Love' smash.
- Now 70, Pope says he still makes videos and is currently casting a film called 'The Photographer's Assistant' while putting together a 50th-anniversary documentary about the Cure.
Why it matters: The memoir reframes Pope as a director whose career-defining advantage was rejecting MTV's glossy templates in favor of 'defiant individualism' — a stance that won him 37 Cure videos and Bowie-level trust, but couldn't insulate him from the Weinstein experience that knocked him out of filmmaking for a quarter-century. For the artists, the book documents creative risks that produced some of the most-watched videos ever made; for readers, it's a primary-source account of how the 'golden age' of music video actually got built.
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