Tim Pope, the director behind some of the most memorable music videos of the MTV era, has published a memoir, I Shoot Rock Stars, recounting his often chaotic and dangerous shoots with major stars. Working with the likes of David Bowie, Queen's Freddie Mercury, the Cure's Robert Smith and Neil Young, Pope built a reputation for subjecting his famous subjects to bizarre, uncomfortable and sometimes genuinely risky stunts in pursuit of striking imagery, cementing his place as one of the defining visual stylists of the video age.

Among the anecdotes are Mercury being dressed as a giant prawn, the Cure being locked in a flooded wardrobe and thrown off a cliff, and a camera being run inside Smith's mouth for the Lullaby video, which he says risked knocking out his teeth. Pope, now 70, began making films as a teenager in Enfield before moonlighting for record labels, breaking through with Soft Cell's Bedsitter in the early 1980s just as MTV launched in 1981; he says he deliberately rejected the channel's clichéd conventions in favour of his own, riskier style.