Music Supervisor Tarquin Gotch Recalls 'Ferris Bueller's' Top Musical Moments

You can’t hear the name John Hughes without conjuring images of scenes from his beloved teen comedies: a slice of middle-class, suburban 1980s Americana that birthed a mall full of teen stars, from Molly Ringwald, John Cusack, and Anthony Michael Hall to James Spader, Jon Cryer, and Matthew Broderick. But with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off finally getting an official soundtrack release this week after 30 years, it’s worth noting that the late director/producer/screenwriter’s movies were almost as memorable for their music as they were for adolescent angst.

“The music was incredibly important to John,” Hughes’s muse, Ringwald, told Yahoo Music in 2013. “He had an amazing, amazing record collection and made me the most incredible mixtapes, which it just kills me that I don’t still have.”

Ringwald added that she used to make mixtapes for Hughes, too. One of them reportedly included “Pretty in Pink,” the 1981 Psychedelic Furs track that inspired his film of the same name.

“The story I heard was Molly Ringwald went up to John Hughes and said, ‘You’ve got to listen to this song. You’ve got to write something about this,’” Furs singer Richard Butler said when I interviewed him for the 2014 ‘80s new wave oral history Mad World. “Hughes loved it and went on to write the movie.”

Despite his wide-ranging tastes, no other director is more synonymous with the music of a certain era — that is to say ‘80s post-punk and new wave — than Hughes. Whereas early MTV was pretty much forced into giving airtime to image-conscious Second British Invasion acts because there was a dearth of videos by American rock bands, Hughes, an Anglophile, happily gave them a home on his soundtracks. This contrasted sharply with the big Hollywood blockbusters of the time, whose producers called upon the services of mainstream, middle-of-the-road artists like Kenny Loggins (Footloose, Top Gun), Irene Cara (Fame, Flashdance), and Ray Parker Jr. (Ghostbusters).

“There was a huge desire on John’s part to introduce America to what he considered great music,” says Tarquin Gotch, a former A&R man from London and manager of acts like XTC, General Public, and Stephen “Tin Tin” Duffy, who spent long overnight hours alongside Hughes selecting tracks for pivotal scenes in both Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller. “The directive was to be ahead of the curve, find new bands, be obscure as you like. His core audience, the teen girls of America, they were ahead of radio, ahead of TV, they were being fed by MTV. He wasn’t putting bands like Duran Duran and Culture Club that had already broken; we weren’t looking to sell records on the names like Top Gun was.” As a result, Hughes ended up creating “a golden moment where the film helped the bands and their music, and the bands and their music really helped the films.”

A happy byproduct was that these virtually unknown foreign acts turned out to be “considerably cheaper than the big ones,” says Gotch — which was important, seeing as Hughes’s teen flicks, which never usually made more than $45 million (Ferris was an exception), had a fraction of the budgets of those other popcorn flicks. “So, for him, it was, ‘Oooh, instead of five famous ones, we could get twice as many of these famous-in-England-but-not-famous-in-America ones.’”

Coming on the heels of The Breakfast Club, which helped Scotland’s Simple Minds score their first U.S. hit, the #1 smash “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller were considered almost as important as MTV to overseas artists trying to break America. “John insisting that Simple Minds be produced by Keith Forsey” — known for his work with Billy Idol — “who gave them the biggest record of their career was a lesson not lost on anyone in England,” says Gotch. With Hughes’s blessing, he ended up placing songs by the Smiths, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the English Beat, and the Dream Academy, among others. “For these bands, it was not only an entry into America, but it bestowed upon them a certain cachet: You were good enough for a John Hughes film.”

With Ferris Bueller finally getting the soundtrack treatment it has long deserved, we’ve asked Gotch for some anecdotes explaining how the movie’s most iconic musical moments came to be.

“Oh Yeah,” Yello

“I suggested Yello, but John chose the track, and, boy, is that the best! Yello is two Germans: One [Dieter Meier] is a studio rat who never comes out in the sunlight and does all the work, the other is Boris [Blank], this German aristocrat who has all the money and can’t sing to save his life. But he could say, ‘Ooooooh yeah!’ Having his song in Ferris Bueller was the highlight of his career — he dined out on it for years and years and years. ‘Oh Yeah’ made Yello.”

“March of the Swivelheads,” The English Beat

“You can’t think of Ferris Bueller without thinking of ‘Oh Yeah,’ nor can you think of it without ‘March of the Swivelheads.’ That was a great night. John had this house in Los Angeles, typical Santa Monica white stucco, red tile roof. [We went] for dinner at the Ivy, then we went back to John’s and we were there all night, trying music against different scenes, with him smoking and drinking coffee. With ‘March of the Swivelheads,’ I thought, Oooh! That instrumental works! I remember taking Dave Wakeling from the Beat to meet him the day we were filming at Wrigley Field for Ferris — he got to meet Hughes and Matthew Broderick. He’s completely blown away, but they were too. They’re like, ‘Oh, he’s kinda cool,’ this English guy wearing weird clothes.”

“Danke Schoen,” Wayne Newton/“Twist and Shout,” The Beatles

“’Danke Schoen’ was pure John, from his childhood. He wanted a cheesy song, and when it came to the cheesy songs, he would know just the right one to put in. As for ‘Twist and Shout,’ John was a huge Beatles fan — huge! But it was a nightmare getting permission for that. At the time, there was this snobbish attitude from big bands who didn’t like to license their songs. So I was lining up alternatives, other songs by English groups from that era who weren’t the Beatles: Herman’s Hermits, the Searchers — somebody who you knew the money would work. I had to be like, ‘We may not get this, John.’ ‘Well, I want this.’ ‘ Would you consider this?’ ‘No.’ ‘What about this?’ ‘No.’ When we finally got permission, we couldn’t believe it. We paid EMI a huge sum of money at the time — I think it was $100,000. But [EMI execs] weren’t happy, because the song was f—ed with: Brass was added in the editing room because there was a brass band [in the film]. When you saw the band playing and you’re hearing ‘Twist and Shout,’ it would’ve been weird if you didn’t hear any brass, so they added it in. I don’t know if the Beatles weren’t happy, or if EMI wasn’t happy, but somebody wasn’t happy: You’re not supposed to f— with the music.”