I Shoot Rock Stars

The outrageous inside story of the music video revolution, told by the maverick director who brought David Bowie, Queen, The Cure, The Bangles, Wam!, Hall & Oates, and more to our screens Tim Pope was there from the beginning, before music videos became slick corporate products, when anything felt possible. I Shoot Rock Stars is his music-obsessive-turned-guerrilla-filmmaker’s wild ride inside the birth of the pop video—smuggled cameras, blown budgets, and no idea too strange to try. After breaking through with Soft Cell, Pope found himself at the center of a creative explosion, feeding the insatiable new machine called MTV, directing the artists and moments that defined a generation: dressing Freddie Mercury as a giant prawn; being called a “funny little arsehole” by David Bowie; hanging out with Neil Young on his ranch; and locking members of the Cure in a wardrobe and launching it off a cliff. Written with wit and unfiltered honesty, I Shoot Rock Stars is a riotous memoir of a time when image became inseparable from music.

Tim Pope is one of the most influential and distinctive music-video directors of the MTV era. Best known for his long-running creative partnership with The Cure, Pope also directed iconic videos for Queen, David Bowie, Wham!, Talk Talk, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Neil Young, Hall & Oates, and many others. His work helped define the visual grammar of pop music at a moment when image and sound fused into a new global art form. I Shoot Rock Stars is his candid, first-person account of that era and his life inside it. Robert Smith is the iconic frontman, songwriter, and creative force behind The Cure, one of the most influential bands of the post-punk and alternative rock era. Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, Smith’s distinctive voice, visual style, and songwriting helped define a generation and reshape the sound and image of modern pop music.