Luca George Prodan (17 May 1953 – 22 December 1987) was an Italian–Scottish musician and singer, best known as lead vocalist of the influential Argentine alternative rock band Sumo. He is widely considered one of the country's most important artists.
Born in Rome to an affluent family in the art industry, Prodan was sent at nine years old to the United Kingdom for school at Gordonstoun. During his studies, Prodan learned to play the guitar and became heavily influenced by the recent progressive and psychedelic rock music that have emerged during the decade. At seventeen years old and one year away from graduating, Prodan abandoned his studies and returned to Italy. Prodan eventually returned to the United Kingdom for work, settling across Brighton, Manchester, and London; he soon became addicted to heroin.
Prodan moved to the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1980 to recover from his heroin addiction, where he met Germán Daffunchio (brother-in-law of Prodan's friend from Gordonstoun, Timmy McKern) and Alejandro Sokol. Together they formed Sumo. For much of the decade until Prodan's death, the band would become one of the most influential groups in shaping Argentine rock of its time. Prodan, along with the rest of Sumo, are credited for introducing British post-punk to not just Argentina, but to the continent, by providing songs in the English language, and for providing a visceral counterpoint to the progressive-influenced themes that dominated Spanish-language rock at that time.
Prodan was the older brother of Italian 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 worked between Shanghai and Beijing before World War II. His father had set up a prosperous business in ancient Chinese ceramics that became untenable after the Japanese invasion of China during the war.
Prodan was the third child of four: Michela (Michaela) and Claudia were the oldest, and Andrea was the youngest. Michela and Andrea worked in the world of cinema, although Andrea has a musical background as a soloist with England's most famous choir in his early youth and as a creative musician in his later years.
In 1962, when Prodan was nine years old, his parents sent him to Britain to the prestigious Gordonstoun School, the same school attended by King Charles III. An urban legend in Argentina is that Prodan once hit Charles III, although the monarch is five years older. During his academic studies, Prodan befriended Timmy McKern, a Scottish Argentine, who would be his friend until his death. In 1970, at seventeen years old and just one year shy of completing his studies, Prodan dropped out and fled from Gordonstoun. As his family requested his search through the Interpol, Prodan was travelling across Europe alone back to Rome. Prodan sold a shotgun beforehand to fund his trip. He was eventually found by his mother in Rome while being arrested by the police.
Later in his life, Prodan got a job at a newly established Virgin Records store in Marble Arch, London. During his tenure with the store, Prodan began to accumulate some of the most famous records – most of which were stolen from a warehouse – in which one in every 10 records he sold would end up in his house. He was quickly fired, but was soon rehired at the expense of clients who claimed Prodan was "the Italian who could discover the title of a song and its interpreter just by listening to an out of tune whistle." Nonetheless, Prodan's second chance at Virgin Records was short-lived; Prodan continued to steal records, and his theft record reached levels of excess. In addition to taking records for his personal gain, he also stole records for his friends and his brother Andrea.
During his time in London, he formed his first band, The New Clear Heads, which shared aesthetics with contemporary punk bands like XTC, The Fall, Joy Division (who later inspired the title of the first Sumo album: Divididos por la Felicidad) and Wire. Prodan's musical sensibilities, influenced by the heyday of British ex-colonial rhythms such as dub and reggae, the latter of which influenced British popular music of that time, 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 began to use heroin during this time. 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 from a heroin overdose, for which he was almost presumed dead.
"It all started with a photo that crossed the ocean from these lands to Rome. Luca Prodan was walking on the verge of death and the family postcard he received showed Timmy McKern's Cordoban refuge where everything was life and nature. One dog, two girls, and a smiling couple with the mountains of Nono as the backdrop for an idyllic life. With Timmy, they had shared the school in the north of Scotland that Prince Charles of Wales also attended. Their invitation was the last card that Luca had to play and win a few more years of life. I didn't even imagine that, years later, with his music he would mark a break in the history of our rock."
Searching for a way out of his addiction – which had already ended his sister's life, and almost his own – Prodan settled in Argentina in March 1980. He travelled without knowing practically anything about the country, only dreaming of a bucolic photo that McKern had sent him of his family upon the mountains of Córdoba, and viewed it as a paradise. McKern informed Prodan that there wasn't any heroin in Argentina and was not known in the country then.
The same day Prodan arrived in Argentina, McKern went to meet him at the Ministro Pistarini International Airport of Ezeiza and let him stay at his house in Hurlingham, Buenos Aires. Among the relatives that McKern introduced to Prodan was his brother-in-law, Germán Daffunchio, who at that time was a 20-year-old sailor. After dinner that day, Daffunchio began to play his guitar. Prodan joined him and began to sing; the two then began to think about forming a band. They immediately moved to McKern's family field in Valle de Traslasierra. Daffunchio eventually introduced his friend, Alejandro Sokol, and thus gave birth to Sumo, with Prodan at vocals, Daffunchio as the guitarist, and Sokol on bass.
During this project, Prodan had to find ways to calm the nerves and anxiety that had remained as a result of his heroin addiction. The area was, already at that time, a hotspot of artists and hippies who went to live in rural areas such as Valle de Traslasierra to escape the repression prevailing in the big cities during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. In this area, Prodan found relief in marijuana, of which there were numerous artisan producers, as well as in alcohol.
Prodan became fond of gin, of which he would drink a bottle a day. When he returned to Buenos Aires to start Sumo, Prodan took his drinking 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, Prodan – unlike other members of Sumo – would never become addicted to this substance.
1981–1983: Sumo's beginnings and release of first album
After observing the promising evolution of those jams, McKern, who would become the future manager of the band, would introduce Prodan to Ricardo Curtet, a guitarist and friend of McKern, to whom he would propose the idea of forming a band. At that time, Curtet was a resident of Mina Clavero. Once presented, Prodan returned to London to start buying instruments and convinced his friend Stephanie Nuttal to be the drummer for his new band. Nuttal had been part of Manicured Noise, a Mancunian-based rock influenced by bands like the Siouxsie and the Banshees and XTC.