The song, which trundled along merrily courtesy of its mambo beat, was based on a sampling of a famous mambo track by the same name composed in 1949 by the Cuban artist Dámaso Pérez Prado. Bega took just 30 seconds of that original song, composing a set of brand new, catchy lyrics for his brand new, catchy track., became an instant, record-breaking hit everywhere from Australia to the UK, Germany, France and the US.wasn’t a brand new, catchy track at all.
. Biesenkamp’s story is he discovered a Prado CD while looking for songs to appear in a German romantic comedy and instantly new there was something special about the track.Bega, on the other hand, says he first heard the song in Miami. When another collaborator, Zippy Davids, found an old recording of the original track and brought it to the studio, Bega immediately began making up new lyrics on the spot. The resulting track became Bega’sThe lyrics were inspired by Bega’s lothario youth, he has said. “I dated a lot of pretty nice ladies when I was younger,” he toldin 2014. “These names of my past, you know, just came to me and I wrote it down, got the melody and the rest is history.”Mambo No.
The court case was complicated and spanned a gruelling seven-year trial period. The case was only resolved when the Federal Court of Justice of Germany ruled that as Bega had reached out to Peermusic and Prado for a royalty agreement, the copyright for the riff belonged to Prado. But given Bega’s new lyrics, the 1999