“There was a time when we were competing with Michael Jackson for who was selling the most records in France.”
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The phrase is not pretentious: in 1983 a cumbia composed by the Peruvian Walter León Aguilar called “Colegiala” sold more than a million copies in France.
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And she earned a gold record for it, on par with other big names in the music industry.
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A Peruvian composer, a famous Colombian singer and a Swiss multinational have to do with this story.
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And the climax took place in the legendary Olympia theater in Paris, in the same theater that Edith Piaf, “the nightingale of France”, packed in the 1960s. Twenty years later, thousands of French people were crying out for “Schoolgirl”.
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“In that first presentation we sang it like nine times. We played it, they followed two more of our repertoire and then we repeated it “, Juan Carlos Díez, musical director of the orchestra La Tipica RA7, tells BBC Mundo.
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The group was then called “Rodolfo Aicardi y su Typica RA7”, including the name of the singer who would make “Colegiala” famous throughout Latin America, in France, Italy and Spain.
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