tarquin

Tarquin Gotch started work, in the mid 1970's in the entertainment business in the London theater as a dresser for Alistair Simms and as a stage hand on Fiddler On The Roof.He progressed to doing lighting for the Contemporary Dance Company of London and sound for The Lindsay Kemp Company.This experience with sound lead to an interest in the music business and a job that took him away from his native London to his current home of Los Angeles. At the famed Village Recorder Studios, he worked as a Second Engineer on records such as the soundtrack to the film Carwash produced by Norman Whitfield.Moving back to London he continued to work in all aspects of the music industry from tour managing to music publishing before joining Arista Records as an A&R executive. There he quickly started signing hit acts (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 Rowan's first live album and was the first to film Rowan’s live show)From Arista he progressed to WEA Records where he signed the Associates and helped bring success in the UK to Prince, Madonna, Shalamar, and many other American signed acts.In the mid 80’s he moved to management and built up a stable of hit acts including, The Beat, Stephen Duffy, The Dream Academy, General Public and XTC. Since most of theses acts sold especially well in the USA, he found himself frequently in Los Angeles and it was here he meet John Hughes.For the next seven years he continued to manage acts and to music supervise all of John Hughes films. He also music supervised a number of episodes of the first series of The Wonder Years and added some American acts to the management roster including Roger McGuin of the Byrds.Eventually, in the early 1990's John asked him to move to Chicago to run his film company, Hughes Entertainment. During the next three and a half years Tarquin Executive Produced Curly Sue, directed by John himself, Dutch, directed by Peter Faiman (the director of Crocodile Dundee) and two by Christopher Colombus, including Home Alone and Only The Lonely.Wanting to move back to Los Angeles, Tarquin spent the next two years working with John Candy developing various projects which sadly came to naught with John's sudden passing away.Peter Faiman then asked Tarquin to Executive produce a four-hour mini series on Mia Farrow for Fox Television starring Patsy Kensit. On the back of the success of this project, Fox hired Tarquin to run their in-house TV movie division Fox Circle Productions. During the next three years he oversaw the production of nine movies including Vanishing Point starring Viggo Mortensen.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 starring Jimmy for the BBC, and the Sony-Tristar film Still Crazy (starring Billy Connolly, Tim Spall and Bill Nye).Partnering with Jimmy he optioned and developed a mini series script for Yorkshire Television based on the Pat Barker book Another World.Last year he developed two films for Showtime, one with Greg Coote and Jeff Hayes as fellow producers, and another with the Emmy Award winning director Robert Dornhelm. With Rhino Films he developed a bio pix on Chalino Sanchez, and with The Framestore (the ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ award winning CGI house) he optioned a cult sci-fi book entitled Deathworld. He also Executive Produced a German independent film for director Niko Brucher entitled Eidelwiess Piraten. Last year he wrote a script entitled Brothers for Imperia Entertainement and is now producing a documentary based on Brian May's book Bang! A Complete History of the Universe. He is also Exec Producing a comedy series with Jimmy Nail for the BBC