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

The Guardian

16-04-2025

In 1980, a tall, thin man landed in Buenos Aires airport, at the height of Argentina's military dictatorship. His name was Luca Prodan, a Scottish-Italian rocker, and he had just finished the last of his methadone on the flight over. 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. 'When I saw Sumo in 1982,' says Prodan's younger brother Andrea, 'I thought, 'This is more than just a band. This is like the Velvet Underground.''
But, despite Prodan's strong ties to Europe and his high-esteem in Argentina, he is barely known outside of the country. That looks set to change – thanks to a forthcoming biopic called Time Fate Love, produced by Birdman co-writer Armando Bo. 'Luca changed music history,' Bo says. 'Here, he's a god.'
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. 'People were hungry for change,' says Sumo's first drummer, Stephanie Nuttal. 'And they loved Sumo. It was different. They were ready for it. And they took punk on board – big style.'
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. But, less than a decade after he arrived, and not long after the fall of the military junta, Prodan died at the age of just 34.
He had already led a tumultuous life even before he landed in Argentina, bouncing nomadically around Europe. 'An Italian guy reborn in England and reborn again in Argentina,' says Peter Lanzani, the zeitgeisty Argentinian actor who will play Prodan in the biopic, which he will also direct.
Prodan's wealthy parents met in pre-revolutionary China: his mother Cecilia Pollock was heir to Shanghai's main tram company, while his father Mario was a well-known art dealer. In 1943, the two were imprisoned by the Japanese army in the Weixian internment camp before eventually fleeing to Italy, where Prodan was born in 1953. Younger brother Andrea – a musician and actor – says the children lived the high life in Rome, sailing the Mediterranean on the family yacht. But their aristocratic ways also meant that Luca was packed off aged 11 to the prestigious Scottish public school Gordonstoun, where the future King Charles was a pupil at the time. 'My parents wanted us to have a good education,' says Andrea. For Luca, this backfired. 'He was unlucky – Gordonstoun was horrible.'
At 17, Luca took up the family talent for escapology – and, according to popular mythology, sold a rifle to fund his getaway, heading back to Italy and sparking an international search by Interpol. 'We had the police looking for him all over Europe for two and a half months,' says the younger Prodan. 'He was a real rebel. Apparently, he had a fist fight with King Charles. I don't know if this is just part of the myth, but I could see it happening.'
After Luca was located, he was then conscripted into, and deserted from, the Italian army. 'He was always running away,' Andrea says. So his parents bought him a house in Chiswick, London, hoping he'd settle down. This also backfired: by now it was the punk era and Prodan became addicted to heroin. In 1977, he started his first band, the New Clear Heads, while working the singles section at London's first Virgin Megastore, where, according to Andrea, Luca was fired by Richard Branson for stealing records.
It was at this Chiswick house – where fans are campaigning for a blue plaque to commemorate the musician – that Prodan first met Stephanie Nuttal, who had been active in the Manchester post-punk scene with Manicured Noise. When bandmate Steve Walsh left Manchester for London, he encouraged Nuttal to move too. There, she was introduced to Prodan and moved into his place.
'He was flighty,' says Nuttal. She didn't see Prodan often, though he occasionally baffled her colleagues by turning up at her workplace to collect rent from her, so he could buy heroin. Nuttal says she couldn't be in the same room as him when he was shooting up. 'He was tall and well-built but was emaciated and literally yellow,' she says. 'But he had so much creative energy, when he wasn't completely under the influence.'
Prodan's addiction worsened when his sister Claudia killed herself. In despair, Prodan overdosed, fell into a coma and was briefly presumed dead. After recovering, he visited the mother of his former Gordonstoun roommate Timmy McKern, a Scottish-Argentine, and saw a photo of the Córdoba hills in Argentina, where his old friend was living with his family. This idyllic postcard, combined with the fact there was very little heroin in the South American country at the time, convinced Prodan to leave for Argentina, where he hoped to get clean.
'He looked at that picture and saw hope in life,' says McKern. But he was in a bad state when he arrived, suffering from withdrawals, fevers, and sleeping all day. The two struggled to make a living on McKern's family farm – they drank instead, and listened to Joy Division LPs that Prodan had brought with him, possibly the only such records in the country. 'Luca said, 'I've studied the Argentine music scene,'' recalls McKern, who would go on to manage Sumo. ''Let's start a band and get some money. It'll be easy.''
With McKern's brother-in-law, Germán Daffunchio, and his friend Alejandro Sokol, they almost had a group – but they needed a drummer. So on a return visit to London to buy instruments, Prodan decided to recruit Nuttal, who was unhappily ticking by in a haberdashery.
With four pence in her pocket and a Gretsch snare drum, Nuttal arrived in Argentina, to the horror of her parents, who objected to its military government. The group settled in Hurlingham, the English quarter on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and rehearsed on McKern's farm in Córdoba, which Prodan called Happy Valley. 'We rehearsed all night because it was cooler,' says Nuttal. 'We got very drunk and when the sun came up, we'd go outside, get into the pool, and go to bed.'
This chaotic energy fed into Sumo's early songs. They quickly earned a reputation, performing in Buenos Aires pubs and bars such as Café Einstein, which Andrea describes as 'the place where all the freaks hid from the dictatorship to freak out'.
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Life was hard in Argentina. Under the dictatorship, tens of thousands of political opponents were killed in clandestine 'disappearances'. LGBTQ people were jailed and tortured in their masses. Inflation was so severe that products were listed with colour codes rather than price tags, because they could change so drastically from morning to afternoon. 'It was a heavy scene with lots of people disappearing every day,' says McKern. 'Then this guy arrived, Luca, who hadn't lived under that – he was completely free.'
Andrea adds: 'Imagine, when he came to Argentina, he was singing in English during one of the most terrible repressions. People were being killed for being suspected of being anti-military. And there's Luca singing anything he wants. He was so weird, the military didn't know what to do with him.'
Authorities sometimes detained entire audiences – but, risking their freedom and even their lives, fans turned up to Sumo shows anyway. Once, when the police had arrested everyone and asked who Luca Prodan was, the crowd defiantly burst into cheers, Spartacus-style. Prodan was briefly jailed, writing to McKern from prison: 'He said, 'It's the same as being in Gordonstoun, but they don't ask you to do anything.''
But when the Falklands war kicked off in 1982, Nuttal felt she had to return to the UK. Singing in English was forbidden. Her presence had caused locals to nickname Sumo 'the English band'. The tabloids, she says, published stories about then PM Margaret Thatcher eating babies. 'She may have done,' Nuttal laughs, but it was emblematic of the tension in the country.
Nuttal thought she might wait things out in neighbouring Uruguay, but returned to the UK, where she says people treated her like a traitor. She gave up music and becomes emotional when she describes how Argentines still visit her to this day, thanks to her role in their country's music history. 'They won't let go and I don't want them to,' she says, 'but I find it quite extraordinary because I was only there for a short time – I didn't even record anything.'
Sokol replaced Nuttal on drums and a bass player and saxophonist were added. The band put out their first record, Corpiños en la Madrugada (Bras At Dawn), in 1983. That same year, the military government fell. But just as Argentina started to open up, Luca was becoming disillusioned with music.
He briefly returned to Europe, and visited his brother Andrea in Italy, where he played a small part in a biblical TV drama, Anno Domini, with none other than Ava Gardner. 'I played Britannicus but they made him a jailer,' says Andrea. 'I remember Luca said, 'I came here on holiday and they put me in prison again!''
While Prodan's European influences had given birth to punk rock in Argentina, the continent had changed while he was away. Yuppiedom was taking hold in the UK – and Italy, Prodan thought, was even worse. So he decided to return to Argentina and throw all his energy back into the band. They signed with CBS, now a Sony subsidiary, to release their first proper album in 1985 – Divididos por la Felicidad (Divided By Happiness), a Spanish-language homage to Joy Division. 'All of a sudden, Sumo just exploded,' says Andrea. 'It was amazing.'
The band had complete artistic control. They played larger venues and their fame snowballed. Two more records, Llegando los Monos (Here Come the Monkeys) and After Chabon, were released in the following two years. Yet, while Sumo had this artistic freedom and Argentina had regained its liberty, Prodan's alcoholism worsened. He was carrying a bottle of gin with him everywhere.
'We tried to get Luca clean,' says McKern. 'But you always had this feeling that this was going to end. In the beginning, Luca directed everything – all the music. In the final recordings, the band more or less presented him with the music, and asked him to sing on it.'
In 1987, Prodan told a radio journalist that he expected to die soon. And just before Christmas, on 22 December, days after what would turn out to be Sumo's final show, Luca was found dead at his home in Buenos Aires' San Telmo neighbourhood, having suffered a heart attack. Sumo split into two bands, Divididos and Las Pelotas (the Bollocks), who became important for Argentina's rock nacional in their own right.
'He was bigger than life,' says Nuttal. Lanzani agrees: 'We hope to get to the soul, the essence of Luca,' he says. He wants the biopic, which is still being filmed, to bring belated international exposure to Prodan. A documentary is also in the works by Italian film-maker and journalist Luca Lancise, to be released next year.
But whether or not international awareness grows, Prodan will always be a hero in Argentina. 'In only six years, Argentina accepted him as one of its own,' says Andrea. 'I think about it every day. He had the strength to break into the Argentine myth machine. And he got in there – alongside Maradona and Evita Perón.'