The only thing an A&R man needs, Seymour Stein once said, was a good pair of ears. Stein, who has died aged 80, might have added indefatigable enthusiasm, a streak of opportunism and a shrewd business brain, all of which he deployed in a career that saw him sign the deals that launched the careers of Madonna, the Ramones, Talking Heads, kd lang and many others.
Those artists enjoyed their first hits on Sire Records, the label Stein co-founded in 1966 and with which he remained synonymous even after his company had been absorbed by the Warner Music group. By the time he stood down in 2018, unhappy with corporate politicking, Stein’s achievements had long since earned him a place among the finest “record men” – as they were known – of his generation.
“I have no easily definable skills or talents. I’m a hit man, a record business entrepreneur,” he wrote in the introduction to his autobiography, Siren Song, in 2018. He played no instrument and had no technical knowledge, for which he was ultimately grateful, believing it might have got in the way of an appreciation of artists who could not be judged by conventional musical standards.
The story of how Stein acquired the US rights to the then-unknown British band Depeche Mode for his label typified his modus operandi, based on instinct and energy. One day in 1980 he picked up the latest issue of a British music paper in his New York office and read about a new group signed by a UK contact, Daniel Miller, to his Mute Records label. On a hunch, he grabbed his passport, booked a ticket to London on Concorde, and went straight from the airport to meet the group in Basildon, Essex, their home town, an hour’s drive east of London. “I signed them on the spot,” he remembered.
Their subsequent success made them one of a string of British bands whose records he released in the US. When his rivals called him an anglophile, it was not always, he recalled, meant as a compliment. But it was British musicians, from the Climax Blues Band to the Smiths, who provided a bedrock for his business.
To sign Madonna Ciccone in 1982, he summoned the singer to his bedside at the hospital where he had undergone heart surgery. Having listened to her demo tape, he offered the 24-year-old $45,000 for three singles with the option to release an album. Going on to sell more than 60m albums in the US alone while helping to reshape feminism for a new generation of young women, she was his greatest success.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Dora (nee Weisberg) and David Steinbigle, Orthodox Jews whose own parents had emigrated from Galicia, the region of eastern Europe straddling Poland and Ukraine. His father was employed in Manhattan’s garment industry while his mother worked at her family’s market in Coney Island.
A heart murmur in infancy kept him away from sports at Lafayette high school, where he discovered that he preferred applying his prodigious memory to Billboard magazine’s charts of current bestselling pop records than to his lessons. The love of music was kindled by listening to the records brought home by his older sister.
During a summer holiday he talked his way into an internship at Billboard’s offices on 47th Street and Broadway. It was there that he met Syd Nathan, the myopic, asthmatic, choleric boss of King Records, the label of James Brown, based in Cincinnati. In 1961 Nathan suggested that he shorten his surname and offered him a job, asking, “Do you want to be a spectator or do you want to be in the game?”
It was at King that Stein learned, from the ground up, how the record business really worked. His knowledge would be expanded while working for George Goldner, another old-time record man, at the Red Bird label, where the Shangri-Las and the Dixie Cups were the hit acts.
There he met the songwriter and producer Richard Gottehrer, with whom he founded Sire, each putting in $10,000. The Climax Blues Band, Barclay James Harvest, Matthews Southern Comfort – all from the UK – were among early successes, along with an album by the Dutch band Focus, before the pair began releasing their own self-recorded albums from 1970.
After Gottehrer had left the label in the mid-1970s, Stein and his wife Linda could be seen patrolling the New York clubs, scouting a new generation of local bands. They were quick to pounce on the Ramones, with their two-minute blasts of brattish attitude, and the cooler art-school rock of Talking Heads. From the UK came Echo and the Bunnymen, Soft Cell, and the Pretenders, whose American singer, Chrissie Hynde, was impressed by Stein’s extraordinary recall of lyrics old and new.
As well as continuing to sign emerging acts – many of them from the UK, such as My Bloody Valentine, Aphex Twin and Everything But the Girl – Stein also played a significant role in the later careers of established stars. Brian Wilson’s eponymous first solo LP was released on Sire in 1988; the following year Lou Reed’s artistic momentum was revived by the first of a series of Sire albums, titled New York.
While on a constant search for new music, Stein used his fortune to eat well and to collect art and antiques, including The Siren by the pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse, which he sold at Sotheby’s in London in 2018 for a reported $5m. In 1983 he helped found the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, into which he was inducted in 2005.
He and Linda Adler were married in 1971, shortly after she had recovered from the shock of his announcement that he was gay. Their formidable and often turbulent partnership, which also produced two daughters, was ended by divorce after seven years. Samantha, their elder daughter, died of cancer in 2013. Stein is survived by their younger daughter, Mandy, and by his sister, Ann.
• Seymour Stein (Seymour Steinbigle), music industry executive, born 18 April 1942; died 2 April 2023
