The lead singer of Les Rita Mitsouko was 68 years old. Her family announced her death on Tuesday 15 September. At the time of writing, the precise circumstances of her death have not yet been made public.
There are singers you recognise after just a few bars. With Catherine Ringer, you could almost recognise her before that. A breath, a cry, a way of twisting a word – and suddenly she was there. It was impossible to mistake her for anyone else.
Together with Fred Chichin, whom she met in the late 1970s, she had invented Les Rita Mitsouko. ‘Invented’ is probably the right word, given how little the band resembled anything else around them. Rock, pop, French chanson, funk, cabaret, provocation, elegance and, at times, something that felt like a joyful anomaly.
Then came ‘Marcia Baïla’. And everything exploded.
The song, a tribute to the dancer and choreographer Marcia Moretto, became, in the mid-1980s, one of those tracks that transcend generations without ever really ageing. Catherine Ringer is already fully realised in it: excessive yet precise, funny yet tragic, popular without ever becoming banal.
Next came ‘Andy’, ‘C’est comme ça’, ‘Les Histoires d’A.’, ‘Le Petit Train’ and so many others. Les Rita Mitsouko weren’t just a hit machine. They had created a whole world. Clothes, music videos, characters, imagery and that strange ability to make people dance to songs that might deal with illness, loss, love or loneliness.
Catherine Ringer also possessed something that has become terribly rare: she didn’t try to be likeable.
She could be beautiful, strange, grotesque, sensual, unsettling or hilarious. Sometimes all of these in the same song. She didn’t seek to conform to the music industry’s idea of what a female singer should be. She imposed her own vision.
And that changes everything.
The death of Fred Chichin in November 2007, after nearly thirty years of working together, could have brought the story to an end. Yet Catherine Ringer chose to carry on. No artificial recreation of the couple. No fake Rita Mitsouko. She carried on alone, singing their songs, recording her own albums and still taking to the stage with the physical energy that had always been hers.
This loyalty to Fred Chichin was perhaps also one of the most moving things about her. Les Rita Mitsouko had been a band, but also a story of love, creativity and life. Catherine Ringer carried on without pretending that nothing had happened.
Today, the duo are definitively reunited in the history of French music.
Catherine Ringer was not just the lead singer of Les Rita Mitsouko. She was one of the most original French artists to have emerged in the last forty years. A woman who had realised, before many others, that one could be popular without conforming, sophisticated without being pretentious, and completely free without asking permission.
And then there is that voice.
That incredible voice.
It could soar, squeak, laugh, scream, whisper, become almost childlike and then suddenly immense. She didn’t simply sing the songs: she performed them with her whole body.
We’ll be able to keep listening to *Marcia Baïla* or *C’est comme ça* for a long time to come. They’ll always have that audacity, that modernity and that strange joy.
Perhaps that, ultimately, is the privilege of truly unique artists.
They die.
But they never grow old.
Farewell, Catherine Ringer. And thank you for this joyful chaos.
