Tim Pope - Middle Career

Middle Career

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, whose stairwell was shared by an S&M prostitute. 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 St and in Putney Bridge's subterranean tunnels on a non-broadcast format for the single, "Cut Out the Real", by Jo Broadbery and the Standouts and its B-side. After unsuccessfully pitching on many videos (and with very little to show as his own work) he was finally engaged to make Soft Cell’s first video for their song "Bedsitter". The video 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; 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 videos followed with Soft Cell, including "Say Hello and Wave Goodbye" and thereafter an entire album of videos for "Non-Stop Exotic 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 filming of the song, 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 video that earned Pope his early reputation as a ‘bad boy’.