Mark Philipp Wirtz (3 September 1943 – 7 August 2020) was a German-French pop music record producer, composer, singer, musician, author, and comedian.
Wirtz was born in Strasbourg, and raised in Cologne, Germany. He moved to England in 1962. Mark Wirtz began his music career while studying art at London's Fairfield College of Arts and Sciences. He was studying drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art when his college rock band, The Beatcrackers, were signed to a recording contract in 1963 as Mark Rogers and the Marksmen by EMI producer Norman Newell. They recorded a single, "Bubble Pop".
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| Wirtz and Keith West |
Wirtz was married to singer Ross Hannaman for a period of time. Together, they wrote and recorded the song "Barefoot and Tiptoe" under the name The Sweetshop, erroneously believed to have been from A Teenage Opera. Wirtz and Hannaman divorced in 1969, at which time Wirtz teamed up with poetry writer Maria Feltham to record Wirtz's concept album, Philwit and Pegasus, for composer Les Reed's Chapter One label. In 1969, his creative freedom restricted by drastic changes in A&R policy, Wirtz resigned his post at EMI Records to return to independent production.
Associations with Larry Page's Penny Farthing label, Samantha Jones, and Kris Ife followed,. In 1970, Wirtz moved to Los Angeles to accept an invitation by his fellow expatriate producer and friend Denny Cordell to work with him at Hollywood's Shelter Records. In 1973, Wirtz signed a writer/artist/producer contract with Capitol Records for whom he recorded two albums, Balloon and Hothouse Smiles. Both were released under the name "Marc Wirtz".
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| Mark with Lee & Kenney Everett |
In 1975, dropped by Capitol for his refusal to tour or perform publicly, he signed with producer Tom Catalano and veteran publisher Dan Crewe's RCA-distributed TomCat label, a short-lived association because of the label folding only weeks after Wirtz's first single release, "We Could Have Laughed Forever". Having become a parent in the same year, Wirtz dropped his "loose cannon" career pursuits and, under the name of Marc Peters, became a freelance session arranger/conductor in partnership with several producers, including Kim Fowley and Jimmy Bowen. He subsequently created numerous pop, R&B and country songs that featured an array of artists as diverse as Helen Reddy, Leon Russell, Vicky Leandros, Kim Carnes, Dean Martin, and Anthony Newley, but in 1979 left the business.
During those years, after savings had run out and royalties had dwindled, Wirtz took on a gamut of jobs, including telemarketer, waiter, maître d', bloodstock agent, interpreter, voice-over artist, seminar leader and eventually sales manager for a Geneva merger and acquisition firm. While taking acting classes during off-times and in the pursuit of a new career as a novelist, Wirtz also realized a lifelong ambition to be a comedian by studying and performing at Hollywood's Groundlings Improv Theater, to eventually take his first steps onto the stages of Hollywood's comedy clubs, including The Comedy Store and The Improv.
After retiring, he spent his later years in Savannah writing, painting and still taking on the occasional musical project. In 1996 he collated all the recordings planned as part of Teenage Opera into a CD. In 2004 he returned to the studio to produce an album by his daughter’s boyfriend’s band, Les Philippes, and the following year he released a solo album, Love is Egg Shaped.
Wirtz died on 7 August 2020 at the age of 76, from Pick's disease which is a form of dementia.
(Edited from Wikipedia & The Telegraph)