The outrageous inside story of the music video revolution, told by the maverick director who brought David Bowie, Queen, The Cure, The Bangles, Wam!, Hall & Oates, and more to our screens

Tim Pope was there from the beginning, before music videos became slick corporate products, when anything felt possible. I Shoot Rock Stars is his music-obsessive-turned-guerrilla-filmmaker’s wild ride inside the birth of the pop video—smuggled cameras, blown budgets, and no idea too strange to try. After breaking through with Soft Cell, Pope found himself at the center of a creative explosion, feeding the insatiable new machine called MTV, directing the artists and moments that defined a generation: dressing Freddie Mercury as a giant prawn; being called a “funny little arsehole” by David Bowie; hanging out with Neil Young on his ranch; and locking members of the Cure in a wardrobe and launching it off a cliff.

Written with wit and unfiltered honesty, I Shoot Rock Stars is a riotous memoir of a time when image became inseparable from music.