FEATURE:
In the Works
IN THIS PHOTO: Tim Pope directing Freddie Mercury (Queen) in 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix
The Videos of Tim Pope
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I won’t be able…
PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Vella
to include all the amazing videos from Tim Pope in this feature. For an idea of his incredible work, have a look at the videos that he has directed. There is nothing especially timely about including Pope in a feature. The reason I wanted to focus on him is because I was listening back to older episodes of The Adam Buxton Podcast. Pope spoke with Buxton back in 2017. I hadn’t realised the sheer number of videos he directed and the range of artists he has collaborated with! I am going to source from an interview later but, before then, here is a bit of biography regarding the remarkable Tim Pope:
“Tim Pope always wanted to make films. He attended in his teens film studies at Ravensbourne College, Bromley, then he got a job working the cameras at a company training politicians of the late '70s for TV appearances and going to No. 10 Downing Street many times. With the same equipment, which he 'borrowed' without telling his bosses, he began to film bands on stage, including The Psychedelic Furs and The Specials. Pope started making pop videos, and by the mid 1980s and onwards was working on both sides of the Atlantic. Bands from past to present include Neil Young, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Talk Talk, The Bangles, Queen, Paul McCartney, Siouxsie & the Banshees…
Strawberry Switchblade, Paul Weller, Amanda Palmer, Wham, The The, Soft Cell, Fatboy Slim, The Darkness, The Kaiser Chiefs, Tim Burgess and most famously The Cure for whom alone he made 37 clips. He worked in TV, made documentaries, live concert films, short films and worked in Hollywood to direct "The Crow: City of Angels," which went to the US No. 1 box-office slot. Tim's recent work includes "Anniversary," a film of The Cure's spectacular 40-year career-spanning performance at Hyde Park in 2018, which went worldwide on release to over 1, 500 cinemas, and in 2019 a well received ITV documentary about the actress Sheridan Smith called "Coming Home." Future projects include documentaries about bands The Cure, The The and Tim Burgess. Also, he is in the early stages of casting his own self-written movie, "Drone," which he hopes to shoot in 2021. He continues to make pop promos and commercials and also lectures in film at film schools and universities”.
I think that many associate Pope with his videos for The Cure. I will bring them back in later as Pope directed a documentary about The Cure a few years back. Before I come to that, I want to draw from Wikipedia. It is amazing reading about Pope breaking onto the scene and eventually hooking up with The Cure:
“While still at HyVision, in 1979 Pope met Alex McDowell, who ran Rocking Russian, a company that designed T-shirts and record sleeves from a studio in Berwick Street. Alex had designed Iggy Pop's album sleeve for Soldier and Pope was a massive Iggy Pop fan. (Pope later became a close friend to the singer and worked with him many times). The duo went on to form a very successful and long-lasting relationship with McDowell as production designer and Pope as director – before McDowell emigrated to America in the mid-1980s to become a movie production designer for people like Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton.
At about this time, pop videos were starting to be made more frequently by directors like Russell Mulcahy (Duran Duran), David Mallet (David Bowie), and Brian Grant (Olivia Newton-John). Pope decided to turn his hand to this new form. His first attempts at rock video were shot in Carnaby Street and in Putney Bridge's tunnels on a non-broadcast format for the single "Cut Out the Real" by Jo Broadbery and the Standouts, as well as its B-side.
After unsuccessfully pitching many videos (and with very little to show as his own work), he was finally engaged to make Soft Cell's first video for Some Bizzare Records, Non-Stop Exotic Video Show, which was a companion release to their debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. The collection was originally issued on VHS, Betamax, and laserdisc in 1982, and re-issued on DVD in 2004. The video for "Bedsitter" had Pope's trademark individuality, as it featured the band's singer, Marc Almond, wearing shirts that matched the walls behind him. In many ways, it is considered this video bears all the major hallmarks of a Pope video: individuality, linear progression in terms of story, and a slight psychedelic feel. (Pope has many names for different genres of videos and this type he calls a narrative/atmospheric. He has lectured all over the world on the subject, including at London's National Film Theatre.)
More Some Bizzare videos followed with Soft Cell, including "Say Hello and Wave Goodbye" and thereafter an entire album of videos for their debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, including the infamous "Sex Dwarf" that featured a handful of real-life prostitutes, their pimp, a trainee doctor in leather trousers, and a handful of maggots that Pope chucked in during, causing a riot when the prostitutes fled from the St John's Wood film studio. The video was later seized by the Scotland Yard Pornography Squad, but handed back soon after, as it was realized that hype was more at play than real facts about the video's contents. The video is considered a cult classic and is even banned from TV programmes about banned videos. It was probably this Some Bizarre video that earned Pope his early reputation as a 'bad boy'.
By 1982, and with a few more videos made, (Scottish band Altered Images, Nancy Nova, Jersey pub-rockers-financed-by-a-millionaire "Volcano", etc.) Pope met The Cure's singer Robert Smith. Their work together was to prove that directors could be constantly innovative, on a factory-line basis. Pope ultimately directed over 37 videos for the group, including many of their most famous songs – "Let’s Go To Bed" (1982), "Close To Me" (1985), "Just Like Heaven" (1987), "Friday I’m in Love", (1992), "Wrong Number" (1997). He also directed the 35mm movie of "The Cure in Orange", which captures their performance at the eponymous theatre in the south of France. He recorded his own song with them, called "I Want to be a Tree", with its B-side "Elephants" and "The Double Crossing of Two-Faced Fred" (a choral verse poem he had written and performed at Latymer, a few years earlier). The single is a collector's item for many Cure fans and Pope was the only early collaborator, apart from their postman, with a song called "I Dig You".
Pope provided the video for "I Want to be a Tree", which was famously achieved in a single, unbroken shot of over three minutes duration – the first time this was ever attempted in a pop video. Pope also musically supported another band he was working with at the time, The Psychedelic Furs, at Hammersmith Odeon, the same stage David Bowie had 'retired' from as his fictional character Ziggy Stardust. Pope parodied Bowie, referring to his own character as "Twiggy Sawdust" (a play on words from the Tree song). This appears to be the climax of Pope's burgeoning wannabe-pop star career. The single reached number 137 in the British charts.
In between commitments to the Cure, the Glove and the Banshees, Robert Smith also found time to perform on Pope's Syd Barrett-inspired "I Want To Be A Tree" single. Pope at the time was the regular director of promotional videos for the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Marc Almond, among others, but was taken aback when his fame on American MTV as a video director began to rival that of the bands he worked for. He described the project as "a real piss-take of what was going on in America", prompted by people referring to "Tim Pope Videos", and said that he "felt really strongly that they were not Tim Pope videos, they were Cure videos or Siouxsie videos or whatever". Over the 1983 Christmas holidays, Pope and a friend, Charles Gray, recorded what Pope described as "this really stupid song" that they had co-written years earlier as teenagers.
Pope made an accompanying video for his showreel, asking several of the artists he worked with (the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Soft Cell, Talk Talk, the Style Council, Paul Young and Freur) to "come along and slag me off on the showreel". He then played the artists the song, while filming their reactions to it. The Old Grey Whistle Test screened the video, which Pope says resulted in several record deals being offered. The song was re-recorded with Robert Smith playing most instruments in January 1984, produced by Chris Parry, and was released on Fiction Records (with a new video) in June, reaching number 34 in the British charts”.
It is a shame I cannot include every Tim Pope video, as the sheer scope and variety of his work is incredible! What I wanted to do was, in an age where videos hold less stock, highlight one of the greatest music video directors of them all. I think that videos should be explored more and we should be encouraging more people to take to the medium. An amazing video can not only take a song to a new place; it can open doors for directors in terms of them working with other artists and even breaking into film. It is a medium that I really love and it was responsible for me getting into music and acquiring such a fascination with the connection between music and film. In 2019, Classic Pop spoke with Pope, as he recently masterminded the feature-length film of their momentous fortieth-anniversary concert in London’s Hyde Park. Pope discusses his work with the band and why he does not direct videos so much anymore:
“You once said, “Even my dreams came with dirt on them, like my Standard-8 movies”? So how did you get into the film-making game?
I’d done the film college thing and ended up working for this company that trained politicians to go on telly. That was at the end of the 70s, so I used to go to 10 Downing Street. I know people do media stuff these days, but this was like the first company to do it. Then Labour and Mrs Thatcher got in, so I always think I’m partially to blame for that.
In the meantime, I used to nick the camera in the evening and go and film bands on stage. I was working with people like The Psychedelic Furs and The Specials, just filming them at gigs with a single camera. And then a mate of mine from the place where I used to nick the camera from had just done a video for Iggy Pop, so I started doing storyboards for videos. I think my first video was for Soft Cell’s Bedsitter.
You directed 14 of Soft Cell’s videos. What made that working relationship so fruitful?
My thing is always to get to know the bands well. I always use this metaphor of the tailor. In a way, all I try to do is create a suit which fits them perfectly, rather than an off-the-peg number. When I get a song, I take it in my mind, sort of chuck everything up into the air and see where it lands in my imagination. I take it from there. That’s to do with the lyrics, what the band have told me, their history… I mean, I can still remember the time I first pitched to Marc Almond. I do a lot of talks to film students these days and one of the things I say to them is, you will have the passion to do anything, you will kill, you will steal, you will do anything, to make your film. And I wasn’t going to let Marc leave that room until he said yes to me. I told loads of lies about videos I’d done, I think I claimed I’d worked with Suzi Quatro, and god knows who else… that seemed to impress him.
You don’t do many music videos these days. Is it a dying artform?
I think they had their moment. The last one I did that I liked was one for Fatboy Slim, for a song called Slash Dot Dash. I love that video because I shot that in six or seven hours and, at that point, I hadn’t made a video in years. The reason I decided to do it was born because, well, my hair had started to become a bit grayer and people suddenly began to give me lifetime awards. I remember the awards morphing in my hands into a carriage clock, like a retirement thing, and I just thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m not ready to retire!’ So I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’ll do this video’, and I did. I still think it’s got a great energy to it.
What do you think is different now about record companies and their attitude towards music videos?
My relationship with the bands was key and nowadays record companies come between you and the band. These days, record companies act more like advertising agencies. It doesn’t seem very relevant, someone like me doing videos. I think there are far better people doing the type of videos that are required.
You directed The Cure’s 1986 concert film, The Cure In Orange. And now, 33 years later, here you are again, directing their latest.
I’ve read some stuff on Twitter saying, ‘I don’t wanna see The Cure in daylight, they’re a night band,’ and they are, but they’ve also got these amazing, uplifting, sun-drenched songs as well. I think the shift from daylight to the evening was very important in terms of the film. That was the story I wanted to tell. Robert makes reference to that early on, he says something like, ‘Oh, the sun’s gone down.’ It was draining his energy before.
What I wanted to do was capture two things about the band. One was their epic music – I think there’s no one as epic as them. Also, the day before the show, I sat in the middle of the band while they rehearsed the entire set in this tiny room and I thought, what I want to do is capture their relationship, so I shot it, hopefully, like a piece of drama. You feel their musical relationship through it and that’s what I was after. I tried to film it from the point of view of it being in the best seat – the seat I had in rehearsal. How many thousands of Cure fans would have died to have had that place? So I wanted to make the film from that point of view.
To me, this film is like Orange II and I think it’s another turning point for them. We’re moving into their third act with this new album they’re about to finish. Robert has told me about it, I know it’s quite dark, I think that sounds very promising.
I am going to do a few other features when I dive deep into the filmography of a great music video director. MTV turns forty on 1st August, so I want to explore videos a lot between now and then. Pope turned sixty-five earlier in the year and, whilst he has had an impressive career, we probably will not see any (or many) further music videos from him. I think that artists and directors should study his work and interviews as he is an inspiring and hugely important director. Without necessarily knowing it, you would have watched many of the videos he has helmed! From working with The Bangles, David Bowie, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Talk Talk, and Wham!, the man has pretty much covered most genres! He is such a versatile and interesting director. I have put as many videos as I could into this feature. I would urge everyone to spend some time watching the remainder of his videos as they are really fantastic and memorable. In 2021, perhaps music videos are not as crucial and interesting as they used to be. It is a sad inevitability of the modern age. To me, music videos are a window into a song; a chance to see it is a whole new way. Great directors have their own style, yet they are flexible and can work with pretty much anyone. Tim Pope is a classic example. That is why I wanted to feature the amazing catalogue of…
ONE of the very best.