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‘Apparently, he had a fist fight with King Charles’: the jawdropping life of Luca Prodan, Argentina’s punk god

He was a gin-swilling Scottish-Italian heroin addict who set Argentina’s music scene ablaze – baffling the junta, who would arrest his audiences. As a biopic looms, we look at the fast life and early death of the frontman still worshipped today

His arrival would soon send shockwaves through Argentina when he started a band called Sumo, acquainted the country with post-punk, and became a national legend who lives on, his music still earning hundreds of millions of streams. He sold a rifle to fund an escape from Gordonstoun – then evaded police across Europe for two and a half months Prodan was like a grenade thrown into the stuffy Buenos Aires music scene, where musicians tended to wear their hair long and often noodled through adept but derivative jazz fusion or rock. Fronted by Prodan with his Ian Curtis-like crooning, idiosyncratic stage presence and completely shaven head, Sumo were dizzyingly funky and unbounded, playing not just post-punk but deftly hopping between new wave, reggae and cumbia.

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