Legião Urbana

Legião Urbana is one of the most successful rock bands in Brazilian history. Originally created in 1983, the post-punk band continued to exist until 1996, with the death of its vocalist, Renato Russo.

Reasons for the Success:
Despite the death of Russo and the group's disbanding, Legião Urbana continues to be the third best-selling artist, with approximately 350,000 albums sold per year as of 2003. With more than 13 million records sold, the band continues to be very well-known among young Brazilians. Legião Urbana was, and remains, loved because of the songs whose lyrics told of many aspects: love, spiritualism, politics, family, sex, drugs. The raw reality of these issues struck a chord with many, including Russo himself.

A well-known characteristic of the band is that they made very few music videos, and by the low quality of the few ones they agreed to make. Renato Russo hated to make music videos.

Renato Russo was the creator of the band, vocalist, played guitars, bass or keyboards, and wrote of approximately 95% or more of the band's songs.

Today, Dado Villa-Lobos (ex-guitar player of Legião Urbana) plays in solo carreer and recorded his 1st CD last september (2005), named Jardim de Cactus. Drum player Marcelo Bonfá also tried a solo career. Bass player for the first three records, Renato Rocha retired from the music business when left the band.