'Each song takes you on a musical odyssey!' The rediscovery of Soda Stereo, the biggest band in Argentina (2023)

Rudy Pensa, the Argentinian owner of a guitar shop in New YorkRudy's Music Stop, was in a back room polishing merchandise when one of his store's most frequent visitors came by. On this particular day in 1988, Carlos Alomar – David Bowie's longtime collaborator – didn't want a new instrument. Instead, he was eager to produce a Latin rock band and needed to point them in the right direction. Pulling out a notebook, Pensa found the phone number he had written down for a singer, Gustavo Cerati, who had recently visited the store, and asked Alomar, "Have you heard of an Argentinian band called Soda Stereo?"

Today, it is a question that would get the attention of any Latino. Asking in 2023, on the 40th anniversary of the band's public debut, is a bit like asking an American or Brit if they know who the Beatles are. "Allin the Latin American market, Soda Stereo knows”, says Alomar, now 72, of a band that sold out stadiums and arenas across the continent, sometimes with audiences of more than 100,000 people: a level of success unheard of for a rock band Latin.

Before the end of 1988, Alomar Cerati met with bassist Zeta Bosio and drummer Charly Alberti and produced Soda Stereo's fourth album, Doble Vida. "Not only did they represent the local community in their lyrics," Alomar continues, "but the orchestration of the song had the exact same progression as all the classic rock 'n' roll bands you heard all over the radio." This familiarity helped Soda Stereo's success, but the sheer panache and extravagance of their craft was the real key: "Each song takes you on a musical odyssey!"

They went unnoticed by English-speaking audiences at the time - somewhat ironic, given that Soda Stereo were Anglophiles and Beatles-obsessed - but by the time they broke up in 1997, after more than a decade together, they had sold over 17 million records. . . And the story might have ended there but for an Internet-fueled resurgence that added an evolving postscript to the band's history.

Takket være en kombination af Spotify, hvor Soda Stereos største hits hver især har samlet hundredvis af millioner af streams, samt Stans Instagram-konti og YouTube-reaktionskanaler, når hans musik også et internationalt publikum af ikke-spansktalende, som aldrig har været afsløret. til gruppen for alle de år siden. Disse fans omfatter Coldplays Chris Martin, som i de seneste måneder fik tatoveret ordene "gracias totales" på den ene arm, Ceratis berømte tak ved Soda Stereo-afskedsshowet i 1997. Bono erklærede sig også som fan i en e-mail. til Alberti for nogle år siden.

"Very exciting," is how Alberti, now 60, describes the growing interest. “I am still a person who does not believe in what I did. So in that respect I am easily emotional.”

For Laurie Fromont, a 42-year-old French woman, married mother of two, her exposure to Soda Stereo came during the Covid lockdowns with the 1992 songin eddies. "It immediately took me to another place with a relaxing atmosphere, like a mental escape from the serious situation we were in," she said. In response, she sent a friend in Buenos Aires a heart-eyed emoji. "My friend told me something like, 'You have to listen to this band from my country. I'm so proud of them.'"

Fromont began working on the band's back catalog and became enough of a fan to sign his name - now along with 29,000 others from 62 countries - toa petitionmaking Soda Stereo the first Spanish-speaking group introduced inHall da Fama to Rock & Roll.

"Soda Stereo was the result of three people trying to create something that was underrepresented in Argentina at the time," Alberti explains from his home in Buenos Aires. Marrying an arena-rock sound with often eerie and spiritual lyrics, eventually resulting in seven studio albums, with influences ranging from the Police to Talking Heads and ELO, the group brought an Anglo-pop sensibility to songs that defined a era. , aslight music(which the group recorded in a single take) andAmerican blinds.

Alberti's first purchase of a jazz drummer was Revolver, and he quickly moved on to the Clash and the Sex Pistols. In the early 1980s, he assumed he was one of the only teenagers in Buenos Aires who listened to the police until he spoke to a beautiful girl named Laura Cerati, who told him that her brother Gustavo was also a fan. This comment intrigued Alberti, who asked to meet him.

Soon all three members of Soda Stereo were in each other's orbit. "Gustavo and I were the same age," recalls Bosio, speaking from Miami, where he lives today. "In college we both studied advertising and music was one of our bonds. Sharing cassettes with bands, making mixtapes – it was like our social media. We started dreaming and then we played together."

Bosio recalls that many of the local bands at the time were so intent on looking and sounding like the Beatles that they ended up making songs that sounded like "an algorithm" trying to mimic the people of Liverpool. Although he admits that Soda Stereo also "loved British music, we were very interested in what was going on there".

Paul McCartney's bassline indfiscalended up inspiring a very similar song by Bosiowalk through Rome, and the song's pulsating introOne million light years, which includes an infectious chorus about being "a million light years from home," essentially echoing Squeeze's openingtempted. The last song Soda Stereo recorded was a Spanish-language cover of Queen's Some Day One Day, and their later influences also included the Stone Roses' 1989 debut. Bosio recalls Cerati's obsession with the sound of John Squire: "It felt like two guitarists at the same time!"

Cerati, Bosio and Alberti played their first show together in Buenos Aires in 1983, the same year democracy was restored toArgentina, which ended years of military dictatorship. In the midst of a cultural boom, rock groups in Argentina were no longer censored, considered subversive and forced underground; Soda Stereo would be the first of the bands known asthe modern onesto commercial and critical success outside of Argentina, and began a US tour.

In 1986 they flew to Madrid and on to the UK, where they ended up at the Glastonbury festival as players rather than performers. It wasn't just seeing bands like The Cure and Waterboys that made it unforgettable – during the festival, England played Argentina in the World Cup. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions bassist at one point informed the crowd that England were 1-0 down after Maradona's 'Hand of God' goal, and members of Soda Stereo looked at each other conspiratorially: "We couldn't express what we felt, because we were in the middle of a lot of English fans who could kill us, right?” Bosio laughs As soon as word came that England had been defeated, they disguised their accents.

Cerati, Bosio and Alberti returned from their trip refreshed and inspired. They completed their album Signos, which established them as megastars: their 1987 tour included 22 concerts, reportedly attended by a total of nearly 350,000 fans.

"We always thought we were onto something," Alberti says of his youthful restlessness. "And in music we were the same: we got bored very quickly, and curiosity made us not want to repeat ourselves." Looking back, he says, “every moment was special because we were looking for something new. And in the discovery of the new, everything was bliss ... it was like [constantly] starting over."

The downside of success, of course, is that scale eventually takes its toll. Unlike their heroes, The Beatles, who gave up touring after just a few years to concentrate on recording, Soda Stereo continued to tour to the end - a decision that Alberti and Bosio say was largely responsible for their split . . "Sometimes you come home and feel really, really lonely," Bosio says. "And all the things that happened to you say you're different now. People come to see you as an alien, as a Martian. As a strange thing that happened to your family. And you feel a little guilty above the.

Alberti also attributes the band's breakup to simply being exhausted. "Also many years together all day fighting for our egos... we were really young when we started and we did really well. We last a long time. The truth is we needed some time apart and that was the real reason. Many things were said about quarrels, but we did not share in hostility. We were tired."

Since then, Bosio has produced bands, performed as a DJ and is currently one half of the rock and electronic music duo Shoot the Radio. the foundation of albertirevolution 21spreading awareness of the global environmental crisis and in 2021 also launched its own beer, 27 Eazy, made with a progressive process of "regenerative agriculture".

As for Cerati, he went solo and released albums that won six Latin Grammy Awards. A full circle moment came in 1998 when he teamed up with Andy Summers of the Police to sing and record aSpanish cover version of the latter's Bring on the Night, named after one of the biggest musical influences in Cerati's career.

Cerati died in 2014 at the age of 55 after a stroke that left him in a coma for four years. The Latin Recording Academy (which presents the Latin Grammy Awards) honored "arguably one of the most iconic figures in the history of Latin rock." For Bosio, Cerati's loss still, almost a decade later, seems "very big" and in direct proportion to all that the late singer achieved in life. "He loved music and never stopped making music."

Today, when his former bandmates talk about what the three did together, they do so in a way reminiscent of a Cerati lyric from the song Doble Vida.In the border. In addition to singing about refusing to talk about the ending ("No hablaré del final..."), Alberti says that he and Bosio feel very much like "guardians" of the band's history, and that the only way to protect it is to preserve goes. talking about it. Without confirming concrete plans for the future, he jokes: "I know something will happen because people want to keep listening to the band." It could be anything from a TV series to a movie, but all he says for now is that they'll be "on the lookout" for what comes their way and that his story isn't over.

Its continuing appeal, Bosio says, boils down to two simple facts. "We made people proud to be Latina. And the music was made with love."