Carlos Berlanga

Punk star of the Spanish 'Movida'

Carlos Berlanga was Spain's first and classiest punk, star of Spanish pop in the late 1970s and 1980s when Madrid's drug-fuelled artistic movement known as "La Movida" was at its peak.

In 1977, aged 17, he co-founded the group Kaka de Luxe with his childhood playmate Nacho Canut. They could barely play nor sing, and their provocative lyrics irked the still Draconian censor. But that was the point: "The Movida meant challenging the previous generation. We just wanted to have fun," Berlanga said.

Despite suffering from acute stage fright that made him cower in the wings, Berlanga then formed the quintessential Movida band Alaska and the Pegamoides, famous for the wild vermilion mane of the female lead singer, Alaska, who is still performing. In 1983, Berlanga formed Dinarama.

One of the gilded few at the heart of the Movida, a fabulous creative explosion which followed the dull, cramped decades of Francoism, Berlanger was diffident, softly spoken, and dressed in black. His early songs, "Odio" ("Hatred"), "Horror en el Supermercado" ("Horror at the Supermarket"), "Hospital" and "Otra Dimensión" ("Another Dimension") rendered the hard edge of Anglo-Saxon pop with a Spanish twist. Berlanga admired Andy Warhol ("Warhol for me is like God for the Christians"), David Bowie and Roxy Music. His best-known song, "Bailando" ("Dancing"), became the Pegamoides' greatest hit in 1982, summing up the self-indulgent, self-destructive mood of the time.

Berlanga continued working after the Movida burned itself out. In 1990 he broke from Dinarama to go solo with an album, El Angel Exterminador ("The Exterminating Angel"), but it was not very successful. Then, in 1995, Indicios ("Clues") offered an elegant collection of danceable pop songs. That too received a tepid response, but Berlanga's electronic album Via Satellite, produced in 1997 with his old mates Canut and Alaska, and the splendid Impermeable (2001) caught a new mood that celebrated the Movida dinosaurs as suddenly hot again.

Berlanga was always pale and skinny, wasted by the excesses of his epoch, and died after a long liver disease. He had been awaiting a transplant. A few years back, he said he was not afraid of growing old – "To grow old is to survive." But he needed someone to chivvy him to work "because I'm lazier than a nightwatchman's jacket".

Berlanga developed as a painter and graphic artist, and created the poster for Pedro Almodóvar's 1986 film Matador. Later he produced posters for the Tenerife carnival and the Valencia film festival, down-to-earth figurative illustrations that were "a certain reaction against the abstract".

Like the best old rockers, Berlanga never sold out. But rebellion in Spain has its limits: at 42 he still lived with his parents. His father, the distinguished film director Luis García Berlanga, is best known for his movie Bienvenido Mister Marshall ("Welcome Mr Marshall"), a wry portrait of Spain as an impoverished cultural backwater in the late 1940s.

Elizabeth Nash

Carlos García Berlanga, musician and artist: born Madrid 1960; died Madrid 5 June 2002.