There were hardly any labels that really fit Víctor Coyote, and that was always his best calling card. Born in Tui in 1958, he died this Thursday in a cycling accident, leaving behind a career that began in late-1970s punk and ended, as he approached seventy, without ever having stopped reinventing himself.
His musical career took off in 1979 with the founding of Los Coyotes, the band he led alongside Fernando Gilabert and from which he took his stage name. The group emerged from ‘psychobilly’, but soon shifted towards Latin rhythms, becoming pioneers of that sonic crossover in Spain long before others brought it into the mainstream.
Their debut album, ‘Mujer y sentimiento’ (1985), put them on the map of the movida, a scene straddling Vigo and Madrid in which Víctor Coyote was one of the most restless figures. The band changed its name in 1988 to Los Coyotes de Víctor Abundancia and produced one of its best-remembered songs, ‘Esta noche me voy a bailar’, before finally splitting up in 1992.
Videos, comics and the Xabarín Clun
The break-up of the group did not mean a pause, but a change of format. By then Víctor Coyote had already spent years combining music with comics, contributing to the magazine ‘Madriz’ between 1984 and 1987, and he threw himself into directing music videos and drawing.
He directed the video for ‘Milonga’, by Los Rodríguez, and for ‘Carmiña Vacaloura’, a track that formed part of the soundtrack of the Xabarín Club and which remains lodged in the memory of much of a generation of Galicians. At the same time he published standalone comics such as ‘Come yuca’ (1998) and contributed to collective publications that cemented his place on the Spanish graphic scene.
A solo career impossible to pigeonhole
In 1995 he returned to the studio on his own with ‘Lo bueno, dentro, disco’, which yielded ‘Jaguarundi’, the theme tune for the Vuelta Ciclista a España that same year. From then on he went on releasing music, drawing and filming, without ever tying himself down to a single medium.
In a recent interview he described his own work as that of someone with “more eye than ear”, and in 2024, when presenting his comic ‘Si te falta calle’, he explained that humour was an inevitable ingredient in his work, though never the only one: to capture life, he would say, you always need a little of it.
Víctor Coyote did not stop working or appearing in public in his final years. Last May he acted as a guide through his own career in an interview, and he was one of the main figures at the Festival de Cans, looking back over eight of his best-known works. His death this Thursday, in a cycling accident, brings to an abrupt close a career that, right up to the end, refused to sit still in a single line of work.