'I Shoot Rock Stars' by Tim Pope
Before he became a music video director in the ‘80s, Tim Pope was a music fan. His enthusiasm for his favorite groups was palpable in his videos for Soft Cell, Psychedelic Furs, Style Council, Queen, The Cars, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Neil Young, Paul McCartney … and especially The Cure. The latter band returned to Pope again and again and the friendly relationship remains. The band’s frontman, Robert Smith, penned the forward to Pope’s memoir, I Shoot Rock Stars.
I Shoot Rock Stars is fun to read for fellow music fans as Pope recalls encounters with famous, remarkable people. Little memories stand out, including Ric Ocasek’s fear of water and Neil Young gas guzzler car. Iggy Pop insisted that Pope call him Jim.
The ‘80s were a heady time for young filmmakers as a new and lucrative forum opened in the form of music videos, culminating with MTV. Citing Stanley Kubrick and John Waters as visual influences, Pope tried to encapsulate the emotions of the songs and build from the images of the stars he shot. He bemoans how music videos became “corporatized” and loathes “the world of algorithms we inhabit today, where gut instinct has been exiled.”
Those were fun years, the ‘80s.
I Shoot Rock Stars: The Wild Adventures of a Music Video Director is published by Diversion.
