Catherine Ringer died in the night of 14 to 15 September 2026, at sixty-eight, consumed by a fulminant cancer that her own children described to Agence France-Presse. Fred Chichin, her partner for nearly thirty years on stage, had died in exactly the same way, given a diagnosis that left him barely two months, in November 2007. Between these two deaths there is more than a cruel medical coincidence, there is the complete closing of an artistic organism that had turned strangeness into method and the refusal of every label into a programme for living. Emmanuel Macron mourned this Tuesday the loss of an artist he called unclassifiable and irreverent, without mentioning that this same woman had refused, barely two years earlier and in front of the cameras, to let him kiss her on a stage. The Republic weeps today, unconditionally, for what it never managed to tame while she was alive.
Belleville, the occupied factory and a name nobody explains the same way twice
She was born on 18 October 1957 in Suresnes, on the western outskirts of Paris, daughter of the visual artist Sam Ringer. The stage was not an accident for her but a childhood inheritance. By the late seventies she was already working with actor Michael Lonsdale’s Théâtre de Recherche Musicale, a stage laboratory that mixed singing, experimental theatre and deliberate provocation, and taking dance classes with Marcia Moretto, an Argentine dancer who taught at a centre in the Marais district and who marked her, in Ringer’s own words, by the way she mixed every style without asking anyone’s permission.
In 1979 she met Fred Chichin. A year later they debuted together at the Gibus club, and soon after they were rehearsing in an old factory occupied without contract or subsidy in Belleville, a working-class and immigrant district in eastern Paris, among squatters, musicians without a label and artists living on nothing with an almost monastic discipline. The duo’s name was born from that same economy of cultural recycling. Rita evoked both the South American music they listened to and the memory of Rita Hayworth; Mitsouko was at once a perfume from the house of Guerlain and the name of a childhood friend of Ringer’s, fused, as both told in separate interviews, with the memory of a Japanese dinner shared shortly after they met. In 1985 they added the article Les, tired of audiences assuming they were listening to a solo singer.
The band never fully explained itself, not even once. It never really tried to, either.
From their earliest concerts they cultivated a deliberately excessive aesthetic, strident costumes, theatrical make-up and a stage attitude that mixed Hollywood glamour with the disorder of a neighbourhood cabaret, long before any video director finished giving that image its shape. It was, even then, a systematic rejection of the good taste the French music industry understood at the start of the eighties.
Marcia Moretto died in 1983, in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, of a fast-moving breast cancer, before reaching forty. Ringer, who had just composed music for the Lyon Dance Biennial, wrote with Chichin a song celebrating her teacher’s laughter and revolutionary style without hiding the illness that had taken her. They recorded it for the duo’s first album, released in 1984 on the Virgin label, which had actually wanted to release another track from the record as the single. It was the independent radio stations that forced the song into rotation, obliging the label to release it months later.
The song was not a commercial calculation. It was, literally, a funeral.
Marcia Baïla sold more than a million copies and went gold in France with 799,000 certified units; at the 1990 Victoires de la Musique it was named the second-best French song of the 1980-1990 decade.
An anthem that reached Bogotá without passing through any record label
The video, directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, fixed in one stroke the visual language that would follow the duo through their whole career, a baroque swirl of saturated colours, impossible costumes and choreographies that seemed to have escaped from a cabaret in ruins. Jean-Luc Godard included, in his 1987 film Soigne ta droite, documentary footage of the duo themselves recording in studio, a gesture that said more about the cultural prestige of Les Rita Mitsouko than any award. Marcia Baïla later appeared in seven different films between 1985 and 2015, among them Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, was covered by Nouvelle Vague in 2010 and ended up, decades after it was written, on the tracklist of the video game Just Dance 3.
That official trajectory, measurable in certifications and filmographies, does not fully explain how a song sung in French ended up playing in private living rooms in Bogotá before any Colombian station ever aired it. The person signing this text arrived in Colombia in the early nineteen-nineties and organised, for several years, private parties where it took nothing more than playing a Marcia Baïla track for the guests to appreciate it every single time, long before local television gave a single second to a French duo most of them could not understand in its own language. Many of those who, today, in that city, genuinely mourn Catherine Ringer discovered her there, in my apartment in La Candelaria, on some ordinary Saturday. Nobody was counting, back then, how many parties it took for an unpronounceable French name to become familiar in Bogotá. No record label ever kept that account. That transmission, made of private nights and the same record played over and over, says more about the real reach of Les Rita Mitsouko than any sales figure certified in Paris.
Nineteen years separate the two cancer deaths that closed an unrepeatable duo
The duo’s entire discography, and later Ringer’s solo career, systematically refused to settle into a single genre. New wave, pop rock, alternative rock and French chanson coexisted on the same record without any label ever quite covering the whole. It was precisely that impossibility of classification that Emmanuel Macron turned, forty years later, into a funeral eulogy.
The first album, produced by Conny Plank, mixed punk, synthesisers and jazz in a calculated disorder the French critics were slow to take seriously. The next two, The No Comprendo in 1986 and Marc et Robert in 1988, were produced by Tony Visconti, the same man who had polished the records of David Bowie and T. Rex, and gave the duo their most widely heard songs outside France, among them C’est Comme Ça and Andy. In 1987 came the Grand Prix of the Académie Charles-Cros and two Victoires de la Musique, best album and best video, while the band collaborated with Sparks on Singing in the Shower, a track Ridley Scott would later use on the soundtrack of his 1989 film Black Rain. A year later, the Prix Val Rock ranked them among the decade’s revelations, belated recognition of what independent radio had known since 1984.
Critics, as usual, always arrived late.
The nineties did not slow the pace. Système D, from 1993, featured a duet between Ringer and Iggy Pop, My Love Is Bad, and the single Y’a d’la haine won best video at the 1994 MTV Europe Music Awards. Cool Frénésie followed in 2000, La Femme Trombone in 2002 and, in 2007, Variéty, with a collaboration from Armenian-American singer Serj Tankian, of System of a Down. In 2001 the Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music also awarded them the Prix de Printemps for best French band, nearly two decades after a label had wanted to bury Marcia Baïla on the B-side of another single. These were trade honours, granted by peers and by the industry, not by political power, the exact difference Emmanuel Macron would erase twenty-five years later. That 2007 record turned out, though nobody knew it yet, to be the last the original duo ever recorded. Two months after a diagnosis nobody had foreseen, Fred Chichin died of cancer on 28 November 2007, at fifty-three.
Ringer did not immediately dissolve what they had built together. She completed a farewell tour titled Catherine Ringer chante Les Rita Mitsouko and more and released, in 2008, a live album recorded at La Cigale that reached number thirty-five on the French charts, before launching a solo career with Ring n’Roll in 2011 and Chroniques et Fantaisies in 2017. In 2014 she co-founded, with Eduardo Makaroff and Christoph H. Müller of the Gotan Project, the Plaza Francia Orchestra, and kept performing in film and television until 2023. As late as February 2026 she still climbed onto a Paris stage, seven months before dying of the same disease that had taken her partner nineteen years earlier.
Chichin never lived to see what came after. Ringer did, and she played it all out, alone, to the very end.
“Unclassifiable, irreverent, profoundly French. She dances. She shines. She will be missed,” Emmanuel Macron wrote this Tuesday on the social network X.
The applause that only arrives once it can no longer be refused
The president himself accompanied his message with a video from March 2024, when Ringer had sung a reinvented Marseillaise during the ceremony that wrote the right to abortion into the French Constitution. What Macron left out is that on that same day, on that same stage, Ringer had publicly refused to let him kiss her, explaining afterwards that the gesture had struck her as out of place in so solemn a moment. Manon Aubry, a La France Insoumise member of the European Parliament, called that same gesture “independent and committed” and flatly named her a feminist icon. Neither Macron nor Yaël Braun-Pivet, president of the National Assembly, who evoked a “free, bold, inimitable” career, needed to explain why a woman who spent forty years refusing to be classified can only be, for the very power celebrating her today, a definitively harmless figure.
There is nothing singular in this mechanism, it has worked so many times before that it barely surprises anyone now. An artist builds an entire body of work out of the refusal of convention, of good taste, of republican solemnity, and dies just in time for the very apparatus she dodged in life to claim her name without running any risk at all. Fred Chichin had nothing to do with any of this, he died before social media turned every famous mourning into a competition of statements. Catherine Ringer did, and her last public refusal, the rejected kiss of 2024, will now sit filed away alongside the presidential tributes celebrating her, as if both gestures belonged to the same story. They do not. One was an act of freedom. The other is, quite simply, what power always does once it has nothing left to fear.
Her own children, in the statement passed to Agence France-Presse, spoke of an artist who marked several generations with her voice, her songs, her great freedom and her singularity. It was, of all this week’s tributes, the only one without an official letterhead.
None of this weighs on Bogotá, nor on the other cities across the continent where Les Rita Mitsouko circulated without official permission and never needing any. There, the only quote that matters was spoken by no head of state but by a woman in an improvised wig, in some ordinary living room of the nineteen-nineties, singing in a language she did not master a song written for a friend who died far too young. That transmission needs no republican tribute to have been real. It held up on its own, for forty years, without a single press release…
G.S.
Sources
- Catherine Ringer
- Les Rita Mitsouko
- Marcia Baïla
- Marcia Moretto
- “Elle était inclassable” : Emmanuel Macron salue la mémoire de Catherine Ringer
- Catherine Ringer, iconic singer of Les Rita Mitsouko, dies aged 68
- Carnet noir, Catherine Ringer, célèbre voix des Rita Mitsouko, est décédée
- La chanteuse Catherine Ringer, voix des Rita Mitsouko, est morte à 68 ans
