Seymour Stein, a powerhouse music executive who co-founded Sire Records, helped popularise the punk and new wave movements and inked Madonna’s first record deal, summoning the singer to his hospital bedside to make sure a rival didn’t sign her first, has died aged 80.
Across a six-decade career in the music industry, Stein flitted between genres and continents, always searching for the next big sound. “What I really am,” he once said, “is an extremist.” He was the kind of music-industry fanatic happy to spend $8,000 to book a last-minute Concorde flight to London to hear a hot new band called Depeche Mode. Upon his arrival, he found “four teenagers poking synths in a dump in the English suburbs” and signed them to a record deal.
