I Shoot Rock Stars (The Wild Adventures of a Music Video Director)

The outrageous insider story of how MTV-era music videos were invented, told by the director who helped create the visual language of pop superstardom while shooting videos for the world’s biggest artists—David Bowie, Queen, The Cure, The Bangles, Wham!, Hall & Oates, and more—at the height of their excess, ambition, and creativity.

Tim Pope was there from the beginning, before music videos became slick corporate products, when they were anarchic, improvised, and wildly inventive.

In I Shoot Rock Stars, Pope—music obsessive turned guerrilla filmmaker—takes readers inside the chaotic birth of the pop video, when directors smuggled cameras into venues, budgets were spent recklessly, and no idea was too strange to attempt. After breaking through with early work for Soft Cell, Pope found himself at the epicenter of a creative explosion, shuttling between the UK and the US to feed the insatiable new machine called MTV.

What follows is a front-row account of the artists, egos, and moments that defined a generation: dressing Freddie Mercury as a giant prawn; being callled a “funny little arsehole” by David Bowie; hanging out with Neil Young on his ranch; locking members of The Cure in a wardrobe and launching it off a cliff. Pope worked with Queen, Wham!, Hall & Oates, Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Bangles, Talk Talk, and many more, making image inseparable from music.

Written with wit, warmth, and unfiltered honesty, I Shoot Rock Stars is a riotous memoir and a cultural history of a once-in-a-lifetime creative moment.