I Shoot Rock Stars by Tim Pope — the outrageous inside story of the music video revolution, told by the maverick director who helped define the MTV era.
With a foreword by Robert Smith of The Cure.
Tim Pope was there from the beginning — before music videos became polished corporate products, when anything felt possible. A music-obsessed kid from the suburbs who smuggled a camera into a gig inside his trousers, he broke through directing Soft Cell and quickly found himself at the centre of a creative explosion that fed the new global machine called MTV.
In I Shoot Rock Stars he recounts the wild ride: dressing Freddie Mercury as a giant Mediterranean prawn; being called 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. Along the way he worked with Queen, Wham!, Talk Talk, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Hall & Oates, The Bangles and many more of the era’s biggest names.
Candid, hilarious and frequently moving, this is a fly-on-the-wall portrait of excess, ego and pure creative energy — the story of a fanboy who ended up working with his heroes and helped invent the visual language of modern pop.
Riotous, revealing and packed with unforgettable anecdotes, I Shoot Rock Stars is the definitive account of a unique moment in music and filmmaking history.
