Luca Prodan

Luca Prodan (17 May 1953 – 22 December 1987) was an Argentina-based Italian-Scottish musician and singer who rose to fame as the leading vocalist of Sumo, one of the most influential rock bands of Argentina, and is widely considered one of the country's most important artists.

He was the older brother of film actor and composer Andrea Prodan.

Luca George Prodan was born in Rome on 17 May 1953, the son of Mario Prodan, an Italian citizen born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Cecilia Pollock, born in China to Scottish parents who lived in Shangai and Beijing before World War II.

Prodan had not only Italian origins but Scottish as well.

He was born after the return of the Prodan family from China: his father had set up a prosperous business in ancient Chinese pottery that became untenable after the Japanese invasion of China during World War II.

Prodan was the third of four siblings: Michela (Michaela) and Claudia the oldest, and Andrea was the youngest.

Michela and Andrea worked in the world of cinema, although Andrea has an unusual musical background, as a soloist with England's most famous choir in his early youth and a creative musician in his later years.

In his youth, his parents sent him to Britain to the prestigious Gordonstoun College, the same school attended by King Charles, Prince of Wales; In Gordonstoun, Prodan befriended another student named Timmy McKern, who would be his friend until his death.

In 1970, at seventeen years of age and one after finishing his studies, Prodan abandoned them and fled from Gordonstoun.

While his family requested his search from Interpol, Prodan travelled Europe alone back to Rome, where he was found by his mother at the very moment he had been arrested by the police.

Established in London during the 1970s, Prodan got a job at the Virgin records store.

In that city he formed his first band, The New Clear Heads, which shared aesthetics with contemporary punk bands like XTC, The Fall, Joy Division (who inspired the title of the first Sumo album: Divididos por la Felicidad, Spanish for "Divided By Joy") and Wire.

Prodan's musical sensibilities, influenced by the heyday of British ex-colonial rhythms such as dub and reggae (which influenced British popular music of that decade), were impacted by the personal style of post-punk singer-songwriters such as Joe Jackson, Graham Parker or Elvis Costello, although the irony of Ian Dury & The Blockheads also refers to the jocular and festive style of some of the songs that Prodan would develop as a leader of the Argentine group Sumo.

Prodan was in charge of the singles section (45rpm records) at the Virgin Records' store in Marble Arch, one of the places where Richard Branson's empire was born.

There, he began to accumulate for himself some musical treasures–most of them stolen from the warehouse–with a limit: one in 10 records he sold ended up in his house.

He was fired once but recovered his job, at the insistence of some clients who claimed "the Italian who could discover the title of a song and its interpreter just by listening to an out of tune whistle."

Nonetheless, this second chance at Virgin was short-lived: Prodan had much more discs at their disposal, and the theft reached levels of excess.

In addition to taking the records he liked, he came to steal records for his friends and his brother Andrea.

This time the employer did not hesitate, and the final dismissal was ordered.

Living in London, Prodan began using heroin.

The area was, already at that time, a hotbed of artists and hippies who retired to live in rural areas to escape the repression prevailing in the big cities during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.

In this area, Luca found relief in marijuana, of which there were numerous artisan producers, as well as in alcohol.

He became fond of gin, of which he came to drink a bottle a day.

When he returned to Buenos Aires to start Sumo, Luca took these new habits with him and thus joined the nascent Buenos Aires underground, a cultural movement that began to develop between the end of the military dictatorship and the return of democracy in which drugs occupied a central place, especially cocaine.

However, Luca — unlike other members of Sumo — would never become addicted to this substance.

After observing the promising evolution of those jams, Timmy McKern, his friend and future manager of the band, would introduce Luca to a young guitarist friend of his, to whom he would propose the idea of forming a band: Ricardo Curtet, at that time a resident of Mina Clavero and that he was convinced by his friend McKern to be part of the group.

Once presented, Luca returns to London to start buying the instruments and tries to (successfully) convince his friend Stephanie Nuttal to be the drummer for his new band.

In 1979, his sister Claudia committed suicide alongside her boyfriend, after locking herself in a car and inhaling carbon monoxide.

After knowing this, Prodan fell into a coma due to a heroin overdose, for which he was almost presumed dead.

Searching for a way out of his addiction — which had already ended his sister's life, and almost his own — Prodan travels to settle in Argentina in March 1980.

He travelled without knowing practically anything about the country, dreaming of a bucolic photo that Timmy McKern, the Argentine-Scottish friend whom he had shared school years in Gordonstoun and later lived in London, had sent him a letter.

In the image, McKern's family was seen in the mountains of Córdoba, as a paradise, to which his friend Timmy added some key information: in Argentina, at that time, there was no heroin and it was not known.

Luca Prodan was walking on the verge of death and the family postcard he received showed his friend Timmy McKern's refuge in Córdoba where everything was life and nature.

One dog, two girls, and a couple smiling with the mountains of Nono as the frame of an idyllic life.

With Timmy, the same day that Luca arrived in Argentina, Timmy MacKern went to meet him at the Ezeiza international airport and put him up at his home in Hurlingham, Buenos Aires province.

Among the relatives, Timmy introduced to him was his brother-in-law Germán Daffunchio, who was 20 years old at the time and was a sailor.

At the end of dinner, Daffunchio began to play a Creole guitar and Luca sang, and the idea of forming a band was born between them.

They immediately moved to the McKern family's field in Traslasierra (Córdoba, Argentina); with them were Daffunchio and his friend Alejandro Sokol.

Thus began the jams that gave birth to Sumo, with Daffunchio on guitar and Sokol on bass.

During this project, Luca had to find ways to calm the nerves and anxiety that had remained as a result of his heroin addiction.