Tarquin Gotch

Tarquin Gotch is an entertainment industry veteran, having worked in the music and later on in film business since the late 1970s.

Music career

Starting out his career in London, he served in a variety of capacities including as tour manager for the band Alphalpha and singer Clive Sarstedt, music publisher for Pendulum Music with acts like Tony Ashton, and run by Jim Beech and Johnny Stirling before joining Arista Records as an A&R executive. There he quickly started signing hit acts notably Secret Affair and Clive Davis soon made him head of A&R where, as well as overseeing Simple Minds and the Thompson Twins, he signed The Stray Cats, The Beat, Elaine Paige, Fela Kuti and Rowan Aitkinson. He produced Atkinson's first live album and was the first to produce a film of Rowan's live show).

From Arista he progressed to WEA where he signed The Associates and helped bring success in the UK to Prince, Madonna, Shalamar, and many other American signed acts in the WEA stable. In the mid-1980s, he moved to management and built up a stable of hit acts including, The Beat, Stephen Duffy, The Dream Academy, Hugh Harris, General Public and XTC. Since most of these acts sold especially well in the USA, he found himself frequently in Los Angeles and it was there that through his friend Kelly Le Brock, he met the director and writer John Hughes. For the next seven years he continued to manage musical acts and film music, being music supervising of most of John Hughes films such as Some Kind of Wonderful, She's Having a Baby (Alex Baldwin), Uncle Buck, (John Candy), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (Steve Martin and John Candy). He also supervised music for the first few episodes of the hit TV series The Wonder Years, and added some American acts to the management roster including Roger McGuinn of the The Byrds, and The Horseflies.

From 2005, Tarquin managed Jon Lord, the founding member of Deep Purple until his death in July 2012. He also managed Marcus Foster whose song he included in the comedy Five Dollars a Day directed by Nigel Cole and starring Christopher Walken and worked with Brian Johnson from AC/DC on his Michael Joseph and Harper Colins book and his radio series for BBC Radio 2 called Rockers and Rollers.

Film and television career

In the early 1990s, John Hughes asked him to move to Chicago to run his film company, Hughes Entertainment. During the next three and a half years Tarquin was executive producer for Curly Sue, the last film directed by Hughs himself, Dutch, directed by Peter Faiman (the director of Crocodile Dundee) and two films directed by Chris Colombus, Only the Lonely starring John Candy and the successful comedy film Home Alone. Wanting to move back to his Los Angeles, his adopted home, Tarquin spent the next two years working with John Candy developing various projects which came to naught with Candy's passing away.

Tarquin was then reunited with Peter Faiman at Fox and was an executive producer of a four-hour mini series called Love and Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story on the actress Mia Farrow for Fox Television that starred Patsy Kensit. On the back of the success of this project, Fox hired him to run their in-house TV movie division "Fox Circle Productions" where he oversaw the production of nine TV films including a remake of Vanishing Point, a series of Alienation films, and FBC's high-rating movie of the week The OJ Simpson Story.

Concurrently, he also was managing the career of Jimmy Nail in the UK, both as an actor and as singer. Multi-platinum albums, arena tours and a starring role in Evita followed for Jimmy. Tarquin also produced, in the UK, two series of Crocodile Shoes starring Jimmy for the BBC. With Jimmy Nail, he created the BBC television comedy series Parents of the Band[1] set around a teenage musical band, which each band member's parents are trying to manage.

With his good friend Steve Dagger (manager of Spandau Ballet) He was associate producer for Still Crazy for Colombia Tristar, that starred Billy Connolly, Timothy Spall and Bill Nighy. He was executive producer of a small German independent film for director Niko Brucher entitled Eidelwiess Piraten that had its world premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival in August 2004. He was also hired by the Exodus Film Group as a consultant and supervised the music for the original Sydney production of the stage musical of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert written by Stephan Elliott and produced by Michael Hamlyn.

Personal life

Gotch is divorced and has a step daughter, Ruby, a daughter, Lucia and a son, Roman.

Filmography

Writer
Executive producer
Associate producer

References

  1. ↑ "Jimmy Nail returns to BBC One in Parents of the Band". BBC Press Office. 2008-03-19. Retrieved 2012-09-22.

External links