Tim Pope has looked back on the riotous videos that made him one of the defining directors of music’s golden age, from dressing Freddie Mercury as a “giant Mediterranean prawn” to putting a camera in Robert Smith’s mouth and creating a 75ft penis for Hall & Oates. In his new memoir, I Shoot Rock Stars, he recalls how he repeatedly pushed some of the biggest names in music into uncomfortable, dangerous and absurd situations.
“The core of my work seems to be sadism,” he chuckles. “I have wondered if it was all some sort of revenge for the brutality I suffered away at primary school, but maybe I’m just cruel.”
Whatever the reason, it has not damaged his career. Pope’s client list included David Bowie and Paul McCartney, many of whom were willing to be, almost literally, tortured for their art. In the foreword to the memoir, the Cure’s Robert Smith praises “every moment” in Pope’s company “apart from the hours spent drowning in freezing filthy water, being asphyxiated by snakes, slowly being fed into a giant spider’s mouth, cut off at the knees, being chucked off a pier or orally endoscoped”.
“That was for ,” sniggers Pope, now a youthful 70-year-old with a mischievous grin. “I had to run a camera inside Smithy’s mouth at risk of knocking out his sweet little teeth.”
Bowie was equally trusting, Pope says, when they worked together in the 1980s and 1990s.
“I strapped a camera to him and got him to fall forward,” explains the film-maker. “If he’d have fallen in the wrong way it would probably have impaled him.”
Pope says he began the memoir after finding a years-old answerphone message from Bowie, who died in 2016.
“It was like David was speaking to me from beyond the grave, because I never said goodbye to him,” he says. “I realised I’d been around all these amazing things.”
How did Tim Pope get started?
Pope’s first steps into filmmaking came at Latymer Grammar School in Enfield, London, where a new film studies class introduced him to Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski and “the concept of the auteur”. He funded his hobby by doing a paper round and working in a chip shop, then smuggled his first 8mm film camera into an Emerson, Lake and Palmer concert.
“Down my trousers, at immense pain to myself.”
After film college, he worked for a company that trained politicians to appear on TV, but began moonlighting for record labels, filming bands live for £100 a pop. At the time, there were very few video directors, and the world of David Mallet (Blondie, Bowie, Queen) or Russell Mulcahy (Duran Duran, Elton John) seemed like “an impenetrable club”.
His breakthrough came when Soft Cell had a global smash with Tainted Love and urgently needed a video for the follow-up, .... Pope says he and art director Al McDowell, who later worked with Spielberg, came up with “mad ideas”, drew up a storyboard and saw the floodgates open after the video was shown on Top of the Pops.
Pope’s rise also coincided with MTV’s launch in 1981 as a global music-video platform, but he rejected what he called its “thou shalts”.
“Thou shalt make your stars wear Spandex”, “Thou shalt include babes with big hair and even bigger boobs”, etc
Instead, he preferred “Defiant individualism. Rebellion was in my DNA. I wanted to cause trouble.”
Why were his videos so controversial?
Pope’s early work often used shock, absurdity and physical discomfort. He filmed Soft Cell amid chains, raw meat and maggots for Sex Dwarf, after which police confiscated the film. He later had Paul Weller playfully stroke bandmate Mick Talbot’s ear, prompting John Weller, the singer’s father and manager, to ring and ask what was happening.
“What are you doing with my boy?”
Pope says another Weller video showed the singer wearing lipstick.
“For another video Paul came out wearing lipstick,” Pope remembers. “I think he was rebelling against norms and the image people had of him.”
Rather than adopt the generic style of many peers, Pope viewed himself as a “bespoke tailor” who customised every video to the song and artist. He made 37 videos for the Cure, drawing on Robert Smith’s childhood claustrophobia when he was bedridden with chickenpox and putting the band in a wardrobe for one shoot. For another, he found the ideal location in an estate agent’s window, was allowed to view the house, and was given the keys.
“They let me view the house and gave me the keys,” he sniggers. “Next thing I know, I’m in there with the crew. Smithy and the boys piling out of the van. The neighbours must have heard The Lovecats coming through the walls.”
Pope says he returned the keys and the clandestinely shot video went around the world.
His regular clients were as maverick or uncompromising as he was. He filmed The for videos underneath a steam train and blasted Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis with an aircraft engine. With Neil Young, he drew on the singer’s “emotionally raw real-life personality” for a succession of fictional characters, including psychotic old drifters and, in Pressure, a man who punches himself so hard that he knocks himself out.
While filming closely, Pope says his camera once left Young with a visible injury.
“I got this amazing shot past his nose on to the keyboard.”
He says he also went through a “Spinal Tap period”, which included a 75ft penis on wheels for Hall and Oates and the earlier “prawn” costume for Freddie Mercury. That prompted drummer Roger Taylor to comment:
“No artist has ever looked so silly in a video.”
By the late 1980s, Pope says he was “jetting about on Concorde, hanging out with Iggy Pop …” He writes about Iggy’s “Cock” Moment, when his camera captured the rocker’s exposed “schlong” on stage.
“Lou fucking Reed and David fucking Bowie, and me, a boy from Enfield, trying to play it cool.”
What was it like working with Bowie, Iggy Pop and Princess Diana?
Pope says he met Bowie when Iggy told him he had invited “a couple of mates” who turned out to be Bowie and Mick Jagger. Later, at Bowie’s Wembley concert, the singer introduced Pope to Princess Diana.
“Sitting behind her while she was hand jiving and singing ‘Time flexes like a whore’ along with Bowie was a brilliant moment,” Pope smiles, “but I got glimpses of the real people. David fretting about his son’s exam results. Freddie making me cups of tea and calling them ‘Matildas’. Behind the gossamer artifice of fame they’re just human beings.”
He also writes movingly about his friendship with Mark Hollis, who was usually enigmatic, and their time spent lying flat and letting music wash over them.
“Fancy some fuckin’ Satie, Pope-ay?” “More sherr-ay, Pope-ay?”
Why did Hollywood appeal to him in the 1990s?
In the 1990s, after his short film Driven to Distraction won several awards, Martin Scorsese wrote to say he liked it and Pope says he was “seduced, in a way” by Hollywood. He was recruited by the now imprisoned Harvey Weinstein to direct the sequel to The Crow.
“A movie which made a lot of money but in which a young man, Brandon Lee, had died. So it was a tricky situation: but I’d loved Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. This was before we knew about wanking into flowerpots and destroying women’s lives.
Pope says Weinstein was still regarded as “good old Harvey”, the most powerful man in Hollywood, though he also had the nickname Harvey Scissorhands because of his reputation for meddling in the cutting room. Pope says that process left him deeply unhappy.
“He was still seen as ‘good old Harvey’, the most powerful man in Hollywood, but his other nickname was Harvey Scissorhands. He had a reputation for meddling in the cutting room and I suffered that really badly. I poured everything into that film and ended up with something I loathed, and he said the worst three words anyone ever said to me: ‘We own you.’ Cos they did at that point.”
He describes the experience as “a brutal experience” and says that after it he returned to London and did not make another video for 12 years or a film for 25. He says he still carries “mental scars” from that period.
What is Pope doing now?
Pope says the golden age of music video ended when MTV dropped “Music Television” from its logo in 2010, but he continues to work. He is currently casting a film called The Photographer’s Assistant and helping to put together a 50th-anniversary documentary about the Cure.
Looking back, he says he remains a fan rather than an outsider.
“I’ve read that my work has been viewed a trillion times, but I’m just a music fanboy from north London who got to work with most of his heroes,” he says. But he does have one more ambition: “I hope Harvey Weinstein reads my book.”
