Manuel Arjona, from the group Locomía, dies suddenly at 58 years old
The band stood out in the dance and electronic pop scene of the late 80s and early 90s
BarcelonaManuel Arjona, one of the four founders of the dance, glam and electronic pop music groupLocomía, has died suddenly in Viladecans, the city where he had lived for a long time, at the age of 58. "Today Manuel's light has risen to heaven, but his memory lives on with us," assured Luis Font, a group mate, on Instagram, along with Xavier Font – his brother – and Gard Passchier.
Locomía was born in 1984, and before debuting with the album Taiyo (1989) the quartet attracted attention for their eccentric and baroque attire and the fans they displayed on stage. Of the first three singles from the debut, Loco mía, Taiyo and Rumba, samba, mambo, the group sold 1.7 million copies and achieved gold record status in a dozen countries, including Spain and Chile – in Mexico it achieved platinum record status, as more than 250,000 copies were sold.
Locomía was marked by modernity and provocation, gestated in the Barcelona underground, although they made their breakthrough in a conducive and thirsty environment for new stimuli like the Ibiza of the 80s, and ended up being devoured by the music industry, based in Madrid – the record label Hispavox – with all the dynamics of advanced capitalism. Their history would be, in part, that of the assimilation into the mainstream of a project with a transgressive vocation, one of the theses of the docuseries Locomía, directed by Jorge Laplace and premiered on Movistar + in 2022.
Manuel Arjona was part of Locomía from the beginning and throughout the 90s, during which the group released the albums Loco vox (1991) – where they incorporated Latin rhythms – and Party time (1993) – more oriented to the dance floor – and although he disassociated himself before the recording of Corazón (2002), he was one of the architects of the group's reunion in 2007, which returned to the stage with a compilation and an international tour and later recorded a final album, Imperium (2014). Arjona dedicated his later years to cultivating painting, one of his great hobbies.