The Cure

Most bands outlive their director. The Cure kept theirs for forty years.

Tim Pope started with them in the early eighties and was still filming the band for their fortieth-anniversary concert film four decades later. Nine of the videos on this page are his. The oldest song among them, Boys Don't Cry, never had a video in 1979 at all — Pope shot one in 1986 for the re-recorded version, and put three small boys in front of the camera to mime it while Smith, Tolhurst and Dempsey moved as shadows behind a screen. Then Close to Me — the band crammed into a wardrobe that topples off a cliff and fills with water — through Just Like Heaven, Lovesong, Pictures of You and the giant spider's mouth of Lullaby, to Friday I'm in Love in 1992. In between he made The Cure in Orange, shot on 35mm over three August nights in a Roman theatre in Provence.

What makes the run unusual is the direction of the dependency. Wayne Isham and Nigel Dick worked across every genre going; Pope has eighteen videos on this site and half of them are The Cure. The other half sits in the same corner of British music — four for Talk Talk, two for The Psychedelic Furs, and The Safety Dance for Men Without Hats.

Other names turn up on the later videos, and this archive stops following him after 1992 — but Pope never really left. He was still directing for the band late in the nineties, and he was there again for the anniversary film. Most bands outlive their director. This one kept his.