My friend and collaborator Don Mousseau, who has died aged 78 after a long illness, worked as a manager or agent for a number of figures in the performing arts. In the 1980s he represented the minimalist composer Michael Nyman during his partnership with the film-maker Peter Greenaway. He became Nigel Kennedy’s manager in 1999 after persuading EMI to relax its exclusive classical contract to enable the violinist to release recordings of music by the Doors and Jimi Hendrix on other labels.
Born to Louise (nee Beaudoin) and Roy Mousseau in the poor suburbs of Detroit, Don left for New York in the late 60s. Mixing with the bohemians of Manhattan inspired him to find work in the creative industries.
On moving to London he married Elizabeth Taylor-Mead in 1971 and began working for Transatlantic Records, where he promoted acts including Ralph McTell, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and the Dubliners. At Shelter/MCA Records he helped launch the career of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, while at Island Records he promoted Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s notorious Derek and Clive records and travelled with the Damned as they became the first British punk band to tour the US.
Following the success of the BBC radio series of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Don released a recording of it on his own Original Records label (1980). He moved into music management, with Peter Godwin’s solo studio album Correspondence being released by Polydor in 1983.
The Greenaway/Nyman collaborations included The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and Prospero’s Books (1991), and Don arranged the release on Decca of The Michael Nyman Songbook (1992), featuring vocals by the German chanteuse Ute Lemper. With Kennedy he managed a collaboration with Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke for Riders on the Storm: The Doors Concerto (2000).
He signed Katharine Blake’s choral group the Mediaeval Baebes to Virgin Records, and their first album, Salva Nos (1997), went silver. Warner Classics released Donna McKevitt’s song cycle Translucence (1998), setting poems by Derek Jarman. The composer Jocelyn Pook told me how much she admired Don’s originality and vision as a manager at the time she was writing the score for Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
In later life Don appeared as an actor in films by the director Ken McMullen, playing Tiresias in OXI, an Act of Resistance (2014) and Richard II alongside Ian McKellen in Hamlet Within (2022).
I met Don in 2008, when I was the drummer of the group the Cesarians. Within a couple of months we were recording our album Cesarians 1 (2009). Don was a fierce and enthusiastic advocate for his artists, and my mentor: he produced an album of my poetry read by the actor John Nettles that will be released in autumn 2023.
Don and Elizabeth divorced in 1979. The following year he married Barbara Gittings. They separated in 1992 and were divorced in 2001. From that marriage he is survived by a daughter, Louise, and a granddaughter, Riley; he is also survived by Sabija, his daughter with Donna McKevitt.
