Shakira willing to pay to axe soap footage, aged 17, from YouTube

The Barcelona-based artist, 42, had not yet launched her first album back then – this would not be until 1999, with Pies Descalzos (‘Bare Feet’) – and believes the scenes still available on YouTube are not flattering to her present-day reputation.

In El Oasis, where she is seen kissing a young man (played by Pedro Rendón, pictured) before being grabbed roughly by men on horses and shouting at them to let her go, the wife of FC Barcelona’s Gerard Piqué is marginally less slender as she is still carrying some of the usual, unavoidable teenage puppy-fat, and her hair is its natural dark colour.

But she is still attractive and in good shape, leaving fans baffled as to why she would want them to avoid seeing her during her early steps into the limelight.

Long before she was known to an English-speaking fan-base – which happened in early 2002 with the hit single Whenever, Wherever, a translation of the Spanish track Suerte, and her first non-Spanish album Laundry Service – the half-Lebanese singer-songwriter and musician from the Caribbean Colombian city of Barranquilla was already clearing up in the Latin American charts.

After selling five million copies of Pies Descalzos, she trebled this figure with ¿Dónde están los ladrones? (‘Where are the thieves?’) in 2000, but the launch of Laundry Service shot her to global fame with 26 million albums sold.

In 2005, Shakira released two very different albums with the same title in English and Spanish – Fijación Oral 1 and Oral Fixation 2, one in each language, and has since produced another four studio albums: Loba (‘She-Wolf’), Sale el Sol (‘The Sun Comes Up’), Shakira, and El Dorado.

Throughout her entire studio career of 20 years, the mum-of-two has sold over 80 million albums.