Seymour Stein dies: Music exec who signed Madonna, Talking Heads and more

Seymour Stein, the legendary New York music executive who signed Madonna, Talking Heads, The Ramones and many more, has died at the age of 80.

Stein set up record label Sire in 1966 and became a key figure in the punk, new wave and pop scenes.

He introduced UK acts like The Smiths, Fleetwood Mac, Depeche Mode, Seal, The Cure and Madness to the US.

“The music he brought to the world impacted so many people’s lives in a positive way,” his daughter Mandy said.

One of the most successful talent spotters in the business, his other signings included Ice-T, The Pretenders, KD Lang and Richard Hell & the Voidoids.

Stein got into the music industry at the age of just 13 in the 1950s, when he persuaded industry paper Billboard to let him have a desk in its office.

He would go there after school, copying their charts from the previous 20 years into a notebook and educating himself by working his way through bound back issues.

At school, he listened to music on a portable radio in class, convincing teachers it was a hearing aid and he was slightly deaf.

“When rock ‘n’ roll came in, I was part of it right at the ground floor,” Stein told BBC News in 2008. “I was blown away and it took over my life.”

After choosing a job with Billboard over university, Stein joined King Records – which launched James Brown’s career – before working for songwriters and producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in the Brill Building, the hub of the New York music industry.

He started Sire with songwriter Richard Gottehrer. With its tennis ball “S” logo, Sire made its name in the 1970s after Stein signed the group that are widely regarded as the first punk band.

Stein had arranged to see The Ramones in 1975, but fell “deathly ill”, so sent his wife Linda, a teacher, instead.

“She came back raving,” he said. “I just drank so much chicken soup that I was able to go down the next day and hire a little studio for an hour to hear them perform.

“In 15 minutes, it was all over. They must have played about 15 or 18 songs in that short space of time. Everyone was awed by their demeanour, but to me it was the songs. I heard great melodies.”

It was at a Ramones gig that Stein chanced upon another great New York band. “I got goosebumps all over,” he recalled of seeing Talking Heads for the first time.

“I stood there frozen, and when they finished I jumped up onstage and helped them with their equipment. I tried to sign them immediately, but it was the longest courtship ever at Sire Records.” They eventually signed 11-and-a-half months later.

Stein himself claimed to have coined the term “new wave”. But his greatest coup came in 1982, when a DJ called Mark Kamins suggested he listen to a new singer called Madonna.

Stein was recovering from a heart infection at the time. “I was in the hospital, I had her come see me in the hospital,” he said. “We talked a deal in the hospital and we did the deal in the hospital.

“Within days, even before I got out of the hospital, she was starting to record what became her first single, Everybody, and we were off and running.”

Madonna’s desire to succeed “clinched it” with Stein, he said.

“I saw her staunch determination and I knew she would work as hard as I did and much harder, in fact. And that’s what you need in an artist. She worked harder than anybody.”

Stein was a lover of UK music and was a partner on Fleetwood Mac’s first label Blue Horizon, and signed licensing deals with UK labels like Rough Trade and Creation.

He snapped up The Smiths after a gig at the ICA in London. “I signed the band right after the show, before I even cleaned away the gladiolas I had been pelted with from the stage by Morrissey,” he said.

In the notes of a 2006 Sire box set, guitarist Johnny Marr recalled: “He was one of the only people in the whole of the States who got it. We wanted to be on Sire.”

Depeche Mode singer Dave Gahan wrote: “He had the courage to sign the type of bands that I grew up listening to, when everyone else was scared and baffled.”

Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch said Stein had “the best taste and ears I’ve ever known”, while Creation founder Alan McGee said he was “my role model in the music business”.

In 2005, Stein was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which hailed his ability to “hear the future”.

Introducing him on stage at that ceremony, Ice-T said: “When you take Mighty Lemon Drops, The Ramones, Madonna, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, Ministry, Ice-T, you put them together, it doesn’t seem like they go together.

“But they do. They all had an edge. That’s what Seymour was into.”