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Video killed the radio star, but who killed the WTF!
The Observer
|July 20, 2025
The fabled music video director Tim Pope is to appear at the North Berwick arts festival, Fringe by the Sea, next month.
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A memoir is forthcoming - My Weird Eye: Adventures in the Golden Age of the Music Video - but for his aficionados his work already serves as an aide-memoire for the 1980s and 90s.
Pope also makes films. He worked closely with David Bowie, but he's probably best known for giving the Cure their otherworldly visual signature, including my all-time favourite video, for Close To Me: a shivering poem to existential angst, with the band squashed into a wardrobe sent bouncing down a hill.
What an intoxicating ride Pope's vast oeuvre is: from Talk Talk to the Psychedelic Furs to Neil Young. There's Soft Cell delivering codpieces and provocation in the banned Sex Dwarf video, and Siouxsie Sioux wafting through a hallucinogenic Venice in hairy-armpitted splendour for Dear Prudence.
This story is from the July 20, 2025 edition of The Observer.
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