‘A True Agent’: Artists React To X-ray Touring’s Jeff Craft Retirement

Jeff Craft, one of the founders of UK booking agency X-ray Touring, has retired. 

Pollstar – Jeff Craft
X-Ray Touring

Craft started out as a booker for both Cowbell and Derek Block from 1979-84, before joining Fair Warning, which became Helter Skelter, as an agent in ’84, according to IQ Magazine.

In 2005, he founded X-ray touring together with his Helter Skelter colleagues Steve Strange and Ian Huffam, as well as ITB’s Martin Horne and Scott Thomas.

Craft told Pollstar he retired “for personal reasons,” and added he would “retain an interest in X-ray until next spring and will be overseeing the handover of my roster during that period.”

Three of Craft’s former acts, the Pixies, Dead Can Dance and Agnes Obel, who are all managed by Key Music Management, provided Pollstar with the following statement:

“For the last 30 years Jeff was strong, strategic and uncompromising in his pursuit of what is right for the artist. A true agent in the very sense of the word.

“It’s been a total pleasure to work together with him as a vital and trusted member of the team. We wish him all our heartfelt thanks and congratulate him on his well-earned retirement,” the statement read.  

Other artists represented by Craft include Elbow, Jarvis Cocker, P.J. Harvey and Pulp, among others.

X-ray entered into an equal partnership with Paradigm earlier this year, a partnership that Paradigm president and CEO Sam Gores had been wanting “for quite some time,” according to his own words.