Tim Pope

Timothy Michael Pope (born 12 February 1956) is a film director most known for his music videos, for having directed feature films, and for a brief pop career.

Pope grew up in the north London suburb of Enfield.

Both his parents were bankers, and he has a sister, Amanda.

He always knew that he wanted to make films, boasting in an interview once, "Even my dreams came with dirt on them, like my Standard-8 movies".

He attended St Andrew's primary school, Cecil Road, Enfield, and then went to St Michael's boarding school in Otford, Kent, returning to north London to attend Latymer Grammar School, Haselbury Road.

While still attending Latymer, he participated in the first ever Film Studies O-level and was featured in the Evening Standard as "Tim Pope, aged seventeen, who wants to be a film director".

To achieve this aim, he began to attend Saturday morning film classes at Hornsey College of Art.

Here he was able to experiment freely with cameras, spending much time photographing various happenings.

His first school film was entitled Voyage, which was shot on a 16mm Bolex camera – and another equally absurd creation was the film Canine Excrement, where he is purported to have followed a dog around the then bombsites of Seven Sisters, waiting for the inevitable to happen.

Pope applied to many film colleges, realising that film was something he seriously wanted to devote his life to, and having been turned down by many, he finally attended Ravensbourne College of Art & Design, Bromley.

The course was more TV-oriented, and Pope achieved his highest course marks when a brief was set to create an idea to a piece of music.

He chose Frank Zappa's "I'm the Slime" from his album Over-Nite Sensation (1973).

When Pope left college, two years later, he found himself unemployable and, after a period of working for Williams & Glynn's bank in Islington, he got his first job with HyVision, a company in Covent Garden that trained politicians to appear on TV.

One of the many people he worked with, apart from Trevor McDonald, Melvyn Bragg, and others, was the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, whom his boss, Stanley Hyland, trained to appear on the BBC's Panorama programme.

Pope says that he left 10 Downing Street with the same camera and then went to Guildford to film the ska band The Specials on stage.

Terry Hall, the lead singer, was later to be one of Pope's many clients, as a pop promo director.

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.

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".

Pope released his own song in 1984, "I Want to be a Tree", The single's b-side was "The Double Crossing of Two-Faced Fred" (a choral verse poem he had written and performed at Latymer, a few years earlier) and, on the 12" version, "Elephants".

Pope 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".