Spanish Pop Star Berlanga Dead at 42

MADRID, Spain (Barlanga Fans Website) - Carlos Berlanga, a pop singer and composer who was a leading figure in Madrid's cultural revival after the 1975 death of longtime dictator Gen. Francisco Franco , has died at the age of 42.

Berlanga died in Monteprincipe Hospital in Madrid Wednesday night after a long battle with liver disease, his family said. He had been awaiting a transplant, according to Efe, the state news agency.

Berlanga wrote some of the most emblematic songs associated with the explosion of music, art and theater that surfaced in Madrid in the years after Franco's death.

The phenomenon was so new and contagious that a word was made up to name it: La Movida, which has been translated as "The Happening."

Berlanga also played guitar and sang in the groups he co-founded: Kaka de Luxe, Alaska y los Pegamoides and Dinarama.

Berlanga was buried Thursday outside Madrid at a brief, rainy ceremony that drew many figures from Spain's show business world, including Oscar-winning film director Pedro Almodovar , who sang in a two-man band back in the days of 'La Movida.'

Berlanga also painted and did graphic art work, including the poster for Almodovar's 1986 film "Matador."

Also at the cemetery was Berlanga's father, Luis Garcia Berlanga , a Spanish film director best known for the 1952 movie "Welcome Mr. Marshall", a comic look at Spain as an economic and cultural backwater in the late 1940s.
Carlos Berlanga was not married and had no children.