Ian Copeland RIP

26/05/06

RIP Ian Copeland—Ian was a brilliant human being, he took on many of the Creation Records Acts to America and was Jesus and Mary Chain’s first booking agent in America.  Not only that, he was the first guy who broke punk rock alongside Seymour Stein in America—we all have massive respect for him.  To read his LA Times obituary please click below.

Ian Copeland, 57; Booking Agent for New Wave, Punk Bands, Including the
Police

By Valerie J. Nelson, Times Staff Writer
May 25, 2006

Ian Copeland, a booking agent who helped the Police and other new wave
and punk bands break into the U. S. music scene by stitching together a
club circuit that the bands could play, has died. He was 57.

Copeland died Tuesday of melanoma at his home in Los Angeles, his
family announced.

He created the club circuit by contacting owners of discos that were
going out of business.

Groups such as R.E.M., Nine Inch Nails and the B-52s benefited. About
the same time, he launched his own agency, Frontier Booking
International in New York.

More recently, he was the principal owner of Ian Copeland’s Backstage
Cafe in Beverly Hills, where top musicians have been known to jam.

He was once considered the least famous of the Copeland brothers. One
brother, Stewart, was the drummer with the Police, while another,
Miles, ran I.R.S. Records, the indie label that produced and managed
R.E.M., the Go-Go’s and Wall of Voodoo.

“Everybody has always said my brother Ian would have been a more
charismatic rock star than anybody he has ever represented,” Stewart
Copeland told People magazine in 1995. “But instead of shouting to a
sea of faces, he’d much rather sit at the dinner table and regale
everybody personally.”

Born April 25, 1949, in Damascus, Syria, Copeland was the son of Miles
Copeland Jr., a U.S. intelligence officer, and Lorraine, a
Scottish-born archeologist. Much of his childhood was spent traveling
in the Middle East.

After teenage years that were admittedly inauspicious — Copeland fell
in with a motorcycle gang given to petty crime — he joined the Army in
1967 and served with distinction in Vietnam.

Years after entering the music business, he said, “When I was in the
monsoon rains of Vietnam, I didn’t think anything could be worse. Since
then, I’ve been in boardroom meetings where I would have traded for
that foxhole.”

He moved to London, where Miles helped him get a job as a booking
agent. With the popularity of Southern rock in the mid-1970s, Copeland
moved to Macon, Ga., where he worked for the Paragon Agency, which
booked tours for such acts as the Charlie Daniels Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd
and the Allman Brothers Band.

When Paragon folded, Copeland opened his own agency, which represented
Sting after the Police disbanded, the Bangles, the Fixx, Joan Jett and
the Blackhearts, Oingo Boingo, the Dead Kennedys, the Cure and others.

In 1992, the agency merged with InterTalent, which disbanded three
years later.

His autobiography, “Wild Thing: The Backstage, on the Road, in the
Studio, Off the Charts Memoirs of Ian Copeland,” was released in 1995.

He was a divorced father of two daughters, Chandra and Barbara, who
survive him. In addition to his brothers, he is survived by his mother,
and a sister, Lennie.

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