Catherine Ringer, Rita Mitsouko Singer, Dies at 68
The voice of Rita Mitsouko fell silent at 68, her family says a swiftly advancing cancer took her. She wrote some of the most recognizable songs in French rock.
When Catherine Ringer sang the opening lines of “Marcia Baïla” in 1984, it sounded like an invitation to dance: a trumpet, a marimba and a rhythm that got the body moving before the ear had time to catch up with the lyrics. Only in the chorus did it become clear that the song was in fact an elegy, a tribute to the Argentine dancer Marcia Moreto, who died of cancer in her twenties. Forty two years later, on the night between September 14 and 15, 2026, the same disease took the woman who sang it. Catherine Ringer has died at 68, her family announced to the AFP news agency on Tuesday, September 15.
“It is with immeasurable sadness that the family and loved ones of Catherine Ringer announce her passing, taken from us on the night of September 14, 2026, by a swiftly advancing cancer. A great French artist, one half of the band Rita Mitsouko, Catherine Ringer marked several generations with her voice and her songs, with her great freedom and her singularity,” her children said in a statement.
The band that changed its name twice before becoming a legend
Ringer founded Les Rita Mitsouko in 1979 together with her partner, guitarist Fred Chichin. The group initially went by Les Sprats, and only took the name we know today in 1985, by which point it was already clear they were making something the French scene had not heard before: rock stitched together with chanson and funk, carried by a vocal technique that could slide from a whisper to a scream within a single line. The band’s biggest hits, “Marcia Baïla” among them, along with “Andy,” “C’est comme ça” and “Les histoires d’amour finissent mal,” still get airplay on French radio today. The band worked together for roughly three decades, until Chichin died of cancer in 2007, at 53.
Ringer was born on October 18, 1957, in Sireuil near Paris, the daughter of a painter, a Jewish man who survived deportation, and an architect. She left school at 15 and moved through a string of artistic ventures, including a brief role in a pornographic film, an episode she never denied or hid. Her singing career began almost by accident at 17, after she took a contemporary music course at the University of Vincennes. She spoke about that moment in an interview published this past April:
“My turning point, I could say, was when I was sixteen and a half. I didn’t really know what to do. What I did know was what I didn’t want: I didn’t want to sit my final exams, I didn’t want to enroll in university. Someone told me to go to the university in Vincennes as an auditor, you could do that back then, today I’d get my knuckles rapped for it. I went to sit in on the lectures of a musician. He played contemporary music, with iii, ooo, vavavahein, sounds like that. He studied the voice, he told us about everything a voice can do outside of classical opera singing. We tried out vocal exercises, and then he hired me for one of his productions. I was seventeen. That’s how I started singing,” Catherine Ringer said.
A voice with no formula
What set Catherine Ringer apart from the singers of her generation was not the beauty of her voice but its range. She could sing a single sentence across three different registers, from near operatic diction to punk, and that was no trick but a direct result of that course at Vincennes, where she learned everything a voice could do beyond singing in the conventional sense. That freedom, combined with Chichin’s minimalist guitar work, gave the band a sound that fit neatly into neither French rock nor Anglo new wave of the time, and that is exactly why “Marcia Baïla” remains a hit that resists any easy category, a song about death that you can dance to.
Chichin’s death in 2007 was a loss Ringer could not replace, and she treated it as such: she withdrew from the stage, then came back gradually. She released the solo album “Ring n’Roll” in 2011, and won the Victoires de la Musique award for best female performer for it in 2012. In 2019, on the stage of the Philharmonie de Paris, she marked 40 years since meeting Chichin with a tour that also featured their son, Raoul Chichin, who plays alongside his sister Simon Ringer in the band Minuit. Their third child, actress Ginger Roman, carries the family’s artistic streak into a different medium.
In her final years, Ringer sang less and less and recited poetry on stage more and more, telling AFP back in 2023 that she had always loved the rhythm of words and enjoyed improvising in rhyme, even in the middle of a concert. That is a fairly accurate summary of her career: a singer who never stopped experimenting, not even after losing her partner, not even as the music scene around her had long since moved on to an entirely different sound. The band that sounded like an anomaly in the early eighties is cited today as proof of how far French rock could go when nobody was dictating its rules, and the voice that carried it had no equal before, or after.
