They Shoot Old Farts, Don’t They?

Image credit: Robert Bray

Old fart I may be, but there’s life in the old dog yet. Arf-arf!

What a year it’s been for me so far!  After a quarter of a century, that’s 25 years to you, my old mucker and best friend Mr. Matt Johnson of The The released his first album called “Ensoulment” to great critical response. He asked me to shoot three music vids, though to be honest I did say if it came down to a choice I’d prefer our friendship over the work thing, as in no way would I wish to jeopardise a relationship that goes back to the early 1980’s, if he did not like what I made. Well, as it happens, he did like them. Ba-da-bing!

I’m also embarking on two other projects with clients going similarly far back in my music video career: The Cure and Neil Young. (Between the three of them, this amounts to a gobsmacking 115 years!)

For The Cure it has been pretty much big news that I am to complete the cinema documentary to celebrate their 50th year, falling in ’27. (In truth, this was meant to be around their fortieth anniversary, but what the hell’s a decade between pals?)  The project was finally officially announced last week in the NME, so I guess I can now talk about it. Basically, Robert Smith is going to give me access to 50 boxes of unseen footage, one for each year. The Goths are going to go mental!

Then with Neil, who incidentally was the first person ever to invite me to the States in ’83, and who on the first trip personally drove me in a 1950’s convertible around LA to show me the sights, it’s a movie project with him and his missus, actress Daryl Hannah, which she wants me partly to co-direct. I Zoomed them the other day as they were both shacked up in their cosy Canadian log cabin.  When I saw Neil strolling about in the background munching on toast, we spent a long time discussing his amazing train set, which he has promised me when I go over we are going to make some time to enjoy together.

Apart from the music videos, there’s the memoir - oh, yes, haven’t we all got one of those lurking in us, somewhere?

In mine, provisionally entitled “The Boy with the Weird Eye: Growing Up in the Golden Age of the Music Video,” I’ll tell many stories, which sometimes beggar belief that they are for real: how I chucked The Cure off Beachy Head in a wardrobe; my first encounter with David Bowie, after Iggy Pop introduced us in an uptown New York restaurant, when we had a bizarre and profane exchange of words,  me becoming a bit too gobby for my own good; building a seventy-five-foot-long penis on wheels for a Hall & Oates video; how I dressed Freddie Mercury of Queen in a costume that resembled a “giant Mediterranean prawn,” according to other band members, Brian May and Roger Taylor.

The book, due to be published next year in 2025, has been a majorly cathartic experience to get out of my system, especially the chapter concerning my “Hollywood years” in the mid-‘90s, where I worked with Harvey Weinstein. I ended up with a No. 1 box-office movie, but also PTSD from the experience.

My real focus now, though, is the self-written movie I am hoping to shoot next year in Berlin, called “The Beating of a Moth’s Wing,” and I have already shot a teaser for it with legendary French actress Béatrice Dalle, who starred famously in the ’90s movie “Betty Blue.” 

As well as being an actress, Béatrice also models for the Yves Saint Laurent brand, who earlier this year asked to use the teaser to launch their Winter ’25 collection. Result, I’d say!

I’m not quite sure how I dropped from the world of advertising, but somehow I did. The first commercial I shot was for Tuborg Lager, and which won me so many awards I no longer had space left on my mantelpiece to accommodate them. I went on to shoot for many brands on both sides of the Atlantic that included Coke, Renault, the BBC, Minute Maid, Kodak, Agent Provocateur, blah blah blah.

Tell you what - I always really enjoyed the work, as it uses parts of my brain that the other areas I work in don’t touch upon. I do love the brief of having to tell the story and to get the message across in just thirty seconds. I enjoy working with creatives and agencies to get what they want for their clients.

Listen, I know the world of advertising at the moment really wants the “tried and tested” - well, if I ain’t anything else, surely I am that? 

Frankly, I’ve always had an energy that burns inside me like a nuclear power plant. This means that every day I roll from my bed in Brighton at around 5 a.m., and after a coffee set about what I am to do that day with a terrifying energy. I love the early part of the day, as it is truly when I can flex what I call “the strongest muscle in my body”: my imagination.

I’ll keep this piece short, but I just wanted to say this: Old fart I may be, but there’s life in the old dog yet. Arf-arf!

So, gi’us a job!

If you have a project that you think might suit Tim, he is contactable through Johnnie Foreigner.