New wave music impresario Ian Copeland dead at 57
Wed May 24, 5:53 PM ET
Ian Copeland, a pioneering booking agent and music promoter credited with helping launch the "new wave" alternative rock movement of the 1970s and '80s with such bands as the Police, the B-52's and R.E.M, has died at age 57, relatives said on Wednesday.
Copeland succumbed to melanoma on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles where he was surrounded by family members, including younger brother Stewart Copeland, a founder and drummer of the Police, his publicist said.
With the help of older brother Miles, Copeland began his career in show business as a booking agent in London, where he discovered the Scottish funk outfit Average White Band, who made their debut in 1973 opening for Eric Clapton.
Copeland moved in the mid-1970s to Macon, Georgia, to work for the Paragon Agency, which booked tours for popular southern rock acts like Charlie Daniels, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band.
But it was Copeland's role in helping brother Miles, founder of the International Records Syndicate (I.R.S.) label, introduce the British band Squeeze to the United States that transformed his career.
The brothers adopted a strategy of building fan support for Squeeze by booking the group on a tour of smaller nightclubs, and successfully repeated that formula to launch other bands, including the Police and the B-52's.
Their work was pivotal in establishing the "club circuit" that helped usher in the punk rock and new wave scenes to the United States.
After the demise of Paragon, Copeland moved to New York and started his own booking agency, Frontier Booking International (F.B.I.), which represented such acts as Adam Ant, the Bangles, R.E.M., nine inch nails, the Go-Go's, UB40, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Oingo Boingo, the Dead Kennedys and the Cure.
The son of a jazz musician turned U.S. intelligence officer, Copeland was born in Damascus, Syria, in the midst of a military coup. As a young man he enlisted in the U.S. Army at the height of the Vietnam War and served in the infantry, earning numerous decorations.
He is survived by his two daughters, brothers Stewart and Miles and a sister, Lorraine, a writer and producer. Memorial plans were pending.
Reuters/VNU
― hstencil (hstencil), Thursday, 25 May 2006 15:22 (nineteen years ago)
Daddy Miles was CIA, used to brag about it, at length,for instance, to Tom Snyder on NBC: "talking about honoring the South Vietnamese, that's like the honor of a whore! HAW HAW HAW!" Like a caricature by Burroughs or Kibrick. Later said he couldn't make any more public comments, his sons didn't like it. But they were influenced enough by some of his attitudes: son Miles showed some of the downtrodden richguy resentments, for instance in Bring On The Night,the documentary about Sting launching his band with Branford,etc., Miles wants them all to wear these little uniforms he's describing (the musicians are all black except for Sting, and the description sounds like something out of Old Hollywood); the designer and the musicians are like eeeuuuu and he's "Ohhh well dont listen to me I'm just a PEASANT after all." And later considered it very "pretentious" of some musicians to boycott Sun City. The families' ties to Alabama may have had some influence too.(In Birmingham,Courtney Cox's Mom married Hunter Copeland, CIA Miles' brother, and later she lived with Ian, which may have helped her own entry into show biz, via Springsteen's "Dancing In The Dark" video. And in Macon, Mike Mills met Ian, who turned him on the Sex Pistols, and got him interested in playing music again, thus the R.E.M. conection.) But despite, attutude,IRS Miles was always good about giving away tickets on the campus of his alma mater, Birmingham Southern, no matter how big the Police got. I met Stewart when the Police were still touring in a beatup van; he was really nice, and turned out I was going to school with some of his cousins. Disconcerting to soon read quotes in Creem, with Sting, way before the Amnesty International etc. plugs, advocating that we "waste" Tehran, nuke'em good, if they didn't cough up the hostages right away. Stewart: "That really would be the cleanest solution." But eventually, when the Police were huge, and touring India, for instance, IRS Miles said he meant it to be a demonstration of the excellence, if not superiority, of Western Civ, and reportedly Sting didn't want him saying that shit, for whatever reason. Yes, they are an interesting family.
― don, Thursday, 25 May 2006 19:11 (nineteen years ago)