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

Starting out his career in London as a tour manager for the band Alphalpha and singer Clive Sarstedt, Tarquin Gotch became a music publisher at Pendulum Music with acts like Tony Ashton, run by Jim Beech (Queen’s manager) before joining Arista Records as an A&R executive. His signing of hit acts like 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, Tarquin 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 at WEA. 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 but also to music supervise 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. Tarquin currently manages Brian Johnson from AC/DC - helping to get his book Rockers and Rollers published by Michael Joseph in the UK and Harper Collins in the US, as well as making a radio series of the same name for BBC Radio 2.

Tarquin has a publishing company called NOT THEM AGAIN MUSIC which publishes music by Ranking Roger from The Beat and Kathryn Tickell (BBC Radio 2’s folk artist of the year 2014).

Film and television

In the early 1990s, Tarquin was asked by John Hughes to move to Chicago in order to run his film company, Hughes Entertainment. During the next three and a half years Tarquin was Executive Producer on 'Curly Sue', the last film directed by Hughes 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'. Eager to return to his adopted home, Los Angeles, Tarquin spent the next two years working with John Candy developing various projects which unfortunately came to naught with Candy's untimely death.

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Wikipedia