Revered music government, Sire Records founder Seymour Stein and former VP of Warner Brothers, died yesterday (2) on the age of 80, after a protracted battle with most cancers. Hailed far and extensive as a “music man” of the previous A&R college, he signed such artists as Madonna, the Pretenders, the Ramones, and Talking Heads, and was one of many key tastemakers of the punk and new wave period.
Born on April 18, 1940 in New York, Stein labored as a teen for Billboard journal and have become a devotee of pop music from the rock’n’roll period onwards. He was a part of the editorial workforce that launched the journal’s flagship Hot 100 chart in 1958. Stein spent two years within the early Nineteen Sixties working at King Records, synonymous with James Brown, and, nonetheless in his mid-20s, shaped Sire Records in 1966 with producer-writer Richard Gottehrer.
The label was an early US accomplice of Blue Horizon, which launched Fleetwood Mac’s first materials, and had its first American hit with “Hocus Pocus” by Dutch progressive rock band Focus. Sire later rose to prominence within the new wave period as he signed the Ramones and Talking Heads and as a drive in leading edge pop, notably with its first US No.1, M’s “Pop Muzik,” and when he signed Madonna in 1982.
Sire was additionally liable for the US emergence of such British because the Smiths, Depeche More, Echo and the Bunnymen, Everything But The Girl, Ride, and My Bloody Valentine. As Stein’s private stature rose, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which he had helped to create, in 2005 and, as an elder statesman famend not just for his musical style however his flamboyant persona, an Icon Award from Billboard in 2012.
Stein left the Warner Music group, after 42 years, in 2018, the yr he revealed his memoir, Siren Song: My Life in Music. In it, he wrote: “Being liked was not my goal in life,” Mr. Stein wrote. “My business was turning great music into hit records.”