‘Every song took you on a musical odyssey!’ The rediscovery of Soda Stereo, Argentina’s biggest band

Rudy Pensa, the Argentine-born owner of New York guitar store Rudy’s Music Stop, was in a back room polishing merchandise when one of his store’s most frequent visitors stopped by. On this particular day in 1988, Carlos Alomar – David Bowie’s longtime collaborator – didn’t want a new instrument. Instead, he was keen to produce a Latin rock band, and needed pointing in the right direction. Pensa retrieved a notebook to find a phone number he’d jotted down for a singer, Gustavo Cerati, who’d recently visited the shop, and asked Alomar: “Have you ever heard of a band from Argentina called Soda Stereo?”

Today, that’s a question that would draw a puzzled look from just about any Latino. To ask it in 2023, on the 40th anniversary of the band’s public debut, is a little like asking an American or Briton if they know who the Beatles are. “Everybody in the Hispanic market knows about Soda Stereo,” Alomar, now 72, says about a band that packed stadiums and arenas across the continent, sometimes with crowds of more than 100,000: an unheard of level of success for a Latin rock band.

Before 1988 was out, Alomar met Cerati, along with bassist Zeta Bosio and drummer Charly Alberti, and produced Soda Stereo’s fourth album Doble Vida. “Not only did they come out representing their local community in their lyrics,” Alomar continues, “but the orchestration of the music had exactly the same progressions as all the classic rock’n’roll bands that you heard all over the radio.” This familiarity helped Soda Stereo’s success, but the sheer brio and flamboyance of their craft was the real key: “Every song took you on a musical odyssey!”

They were largely unnoticed by English-speaking audiences at the time – a little ironic given that Soda Stereo were anglophiles and Beatles obsessives – but by the time they broke up in 1997 after more than a decade together, they’d sold upwards of 17m records. And the story might have ended there, but for an internet-fuelled resurgence that’s added a still-unfolding postscript to the band’s story.

Thanks to a combination of Spotify, where Soda Stereo’s biggest hits have racked up hundreds of millions of streams each, as well as Instagram stan accounts and YouTube reaction channels, their music is also now reaching an international audience of non-Spanish speakers who were never exposed to the group all those years ago. Those fans include Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who in recent months went so far as to tattoo on one arm the words “gracias totales”, Cerati’s famous words of thanks at Soda Stereo’s farewell concert in 1997. Bono also declared himself a fan in an email to Alberti a couple of years ago.

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

For Laurie Fromont, a 42-year-old French married mother of two, her exposure to Soda Stereo came during the Covid lockdowns, with the 1992 song En Remolinos. “It immediately moved me somewhere else with a soothing atmosphere, like a mental escape during the awful situation we were all in,” she said. In response, she sent a friend in Buenos Aires an emoji with heart eyes. “My friend told me something like: ‘You have to listen to this band of my country. I’m so proud of them.’”

Fromont began working her way through the band’s catalogue, becoming enough of a fan that she signed her name – now along with 29,000 others from 62 countries – to a petition to make Soda Stereo the first Spanish-language group inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

“Soda Stereo was the result of three people trying to generate something that at that time was hardly represented in Argentina,” Alberti explains from his home in Buenos Aires. They married an arena rock sound to often mysterious and spiritual lyrics, eventually resulting in seven studio albums, drawing on influences that ranged from the Police to Talking Heads and ELO, the group brought an Anglo-pop sensibility to era-defining songs such as De Música Ligera (which the group recorded in a single take) and Persiana Americana.

The son of a jazz drummer, Alberti’s first album purchase was Revolver and he soon moved on to the Clash and Sex Pistols. By the early 80s he assumed he was one of the only teenagers in Buenos Aires listening to the Police, until he chatted up a pretty girl called Laura Cerati who told him that her brother Gustavo also happened to be a fan. That comment intrigued Alberti, who asked to meet him.

Soon, all three Soda Stereo members were in each other’s orbit. “Gustavo and I were both the same age,” remembers Bosio, speaking from Miami where he now lives. “In college, we both studied advertising, and music was one of our links. Sharing cassettes of bands, making mixtapes – it was like our social media. We began to dream, and then to play together.”

Bosio recalls that many of the local bands at the time were so intent on looking and sounding like the Beatles, they ended up making music that sounded like how “an algorithm” might try to imitate the Liverpudlians. Though he does admit that Soda Stereo also “loved British music, we were very into what happened there”.

Paul McCartney’s bass line in Taxman ended up inspiring a very similar one from Bosio in the song Paseando por Roma, and the pulsating introduction to the song Un Millón de Años Luz, which includes an infectious refrain about being “a million light years from home”, essentially repurposes the opening of Squeeze’s Tempted. The last song Soda Stereo ever recorded was a Spanish-language cover of Queen’s Some Day One Day, and their latter-day influences also included the Stone Roses’ 1989 debut. Bosio recalls obsessing with Cerati over John Squire’s sound: “It sounded like two guitar players, at the same time!”

Cerati, Bosio, and Alberti played their first show together in Buenos Aires in 1983, the same year that democracy was restored to Argentina, bringing years of military dictatorship to an end. Amid a cultural boom, Argentina’s rock groups were no longer censored, regarded as subversive, and forced underground; Soda Stereo would be the first of the bands known as los modernos to find commercial and critical success outside Argentina, and began touring the US.

In 1986, they flew to Madrid and made their way to the UK, ending up at Glastonbury festival as punters rather than performers. It wasn’t just watching bands such as the Cure and the Waterboys that made it unforgettable – during the festival, England played Argentina in the World Cup. The bassist from Lloyd Cole and the Commotions at one point informed the crowd that England was 1-0 down after Maradona’s “hand of God” goal, and the Soda Stereo members 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, no?” Bosio laughs. Once word spread that England had been beaten, they disguised their accents.

Cerati, Bosio, and Alberti came home from the trip refreshed and inspired. They finished off their album Signos, which cemented them as megastars: their 1987 tour included 22 shows reportedly attended by a combined total of almost 350,000 fans.

“We always thought we were on our way to something,” Alberti says of their youthful restlessness. “And in music, we were the same: we got bored very quickly, and curiosity led us to not want to repeat ourselves.” In hindsight, he says, “every moment was special, because we were looking for something new. And in the discovery of that something new, everything was happiness … it was like [constantly] starting over.”

The flipside to success, of course, is that scale eventually takes its toll. Unlike their heroes the Beatles, who gave up touring after only a few years to focus on recording, Soda Stereo kept touring right up until the end – a decision that both Alberti and Bosio say was in large part responsible for the breakup. “Sometimes, you arrive at home and feel very, very solitary,” says Bosio. “And all the things that happened to you tell you that you are now different. People come to see you like an alien, like a Martian. Like a strange thing that has happened to your family. And you feel a little guilty about that.”

Alberti, likewise, blames the dissolution of the band on the fact that they were simply exhausted. “Added to that are many years of being together all day, fighting for our egos … we were very young when we started, and we did too well. We lasted too long. The truth was that we needed time apart, and that was the real reason. Then a lot of things were said, about fights, but we didn’t part in hostility. We were tired.”

Bosio has since produced bands, performed as a DJ, and is currently one half of the rock and electronic music duo Shoot the Radio. Alberti’s foundation Revolution 21 spreads awareness about the global environmental crisis and in 2021 he also launched his own beer, 27 Eazy, made with a progressive “regenerative agriculture” process.

As for Cerati, he went solo, releasing albums that won six Latin Grammy awards. A full-circle moment came in 1998, when he teamed up with the Police’s Andy Summers to sing and record a Spanish-language cover version of the latter’s Bring on the Night, in tribute to one of the biggest musical influences of Cerati’s career.

Cerati died in 2014 at age 55, following a stroke that had left him in a coma for four years. The Latin Recording Academy (which presents the Latin Grammy awards) paid tribute to “undoubtedly one of the most iconic figures in Latin rock history”. To Bosio, the loss of Cerati still feels, almost a decade later, “very big” and in direct proportion to everything that the late singer achieved in life. “He loved music, and he never stopped making music.”

When his former bandmates talk today about what the three of them did together, they do so in a way that feels reminiscent of a Cerati lyric from the Doble Vida song En El Borde. Just like the way he sang about refusing to talk about the end (“No hablaré del final …”), Alberti says that he and Bosio very much feel like “guardians” of the band’s history, and that the only way to protect it is to keep talking about it. Without confirming any specific future plans, he teases: “I know something is going to happen, because people want to continue listening to the band.” It could be anything from a TV series to a movie, but the only thing he’s saying for now is that they’ll be “attentive” to whatever comes their way, and that their story is not over.

Their ongoing appeal, Bosio says, boils down to two simple facts. “We made people feel proud to be Latin. And the music was made with love.”