He was first the other half of Rita, then her lover, her husband, and finally, the father of her three children. For nearly thirty years, Catherine Ringer, singer of Rita Mitsouko, and Frédéric Chichin, guitarist of the group, formed a duo on stage and in town. While the singer died this September 14 at the age of 68, carried away by a devastating cancer, we look back at her love story with the man who was her alter ego until his death, in 2007, at only 53 years old.
The couple met in 1979, in Paris, at the Maison populaire de Montreuil. At that time, Catherine Ringer was 21 years old. She plays music as an amateur, loves singing, adores Maria Callas and Georges Brassens and even tries her hand at writing. While participating in an avant-garde musical theater project called Flashes rouge, she crossed paths with Frédéric Chichin, a young musician with piercing blue eyes, with whom she became friends during rehearsals. Son of a painter and communist activist, he has just been recruited as a guitarist for the musical. The man who left school at 16 with the dream of following in the footsteps of Jimi Hendrix has already played in several French punk groups, including Fassbinder, Taxi Girl, with Daniel Darc, and Gazoline. In an article in Le Parisien published in 2019, Catherine Ringer recounted their beginnings: “I sang in a kind of far-left theater show about the excluded. I was making strong remarks, which I didn't necessarily mean, moreover. We needed a guitarist and Fred came. He stayed a week and poached me: “Come on, we’re going to make a rock band.”
For the singer and the musician, love at first sight is twofold. Both listen to the same groups and share the same idols, from Iggy Pop to Bob Dylan, including the Rolling Stones. Their differences, far from dividing them, also nourish them: he introduced her to rap, she says, but also to funk and James Brown. Together, they listen to the Beatles and their White Album. It is in this musical broth that the contours of their own universe gradually take shape: surreal lyrics, biting, sometimes absurd humor, and this mixture of genres which will become their signature. Enough to write, a few years later, that love stories end badly... in general.
Initially, their duo was called Sprats, named after this small fish also called menuise, blanquette or Norwegian anchovy. “But we found better,” she said again in the columns of our colleagues. “I was looking for funny names by mixing music hall artists and Guerlain perfumes that I liked and I wrote Rita Mitsouko. Mitsouko is a perfume. Fred liked: “It doesn’t mean anything special, it’s beautiful and international.” “But we’re going to believe that it’s me, Rita Mitsouko,” I told him. He replied: “It doesn’t matter.” He was very humble, Fred.”
The couple then worked at home, blackened sheets of paper and went off to sing their songs in the evening, in Parisian bars. After a few collaborations – they notably composed and performed the music for Aux Limits de la Mer, the first work by Armando Llamas, directed by Catherine Dasté with Marcia Moretto – they released their first 45, Minuit dansant, then their first album, Rita Mitsouko, driven by the immense success of Marcia Baïla. The hits followed one another and permanently established the duo in the French musical landscape: Les Histoires d’A., on the album The No Comprendo, Andy and C’est comme ça, or even Les Amants, on Système D.
Born from their story, Catherine Ringer and Fred Chichin have three children: Ginger, born in 1984, Simone, born in 1990, and Raoul, born in 1992. Now parents but still performing artists, they remain faithful to what has united them since their beginnings, mixing universes and influences, according to their albums in the 2000s, from jazz to punk via new wave. In 2007, however, their lives changed. Frédéric Chichin suffers from liver cancer and the group has to cancel several concerts. Catherine Ringer would later recount her companion's last words on their music: "When he fell ill, after his last concert at the Rock en Seine festival, he told me: 'Continue without me. I am replaceable as a guitarist. You're the one who puts on the show.' But we didn’t replace him.” Two months after the diagnosis, the musician, the artist and the other half of Catherine died at the age of 53, on November 28, 2007, surrounded by their children.
The singer will never hide the violence of mourning. Eight months after the disappearance of Frédéric Chichin, she tried to return to the stage, before experiencing, in 2008, an episode of exhaustion leading to her being hospitalized. “I spent four weeks in psychiatric internment,” she confided to Le Parisien in 2011. “My brain was a little tired. I had to rest.” Then added: “I had a plane ticket problem at the airport and I lost my temper. I was on edge.” In 2021, at the microphone of RFM, she will also recognize that, if time takes away the shock, it does not erase anything: "Bereavement like this, there is always pain (...) I accepted anyway, the pain is stronger if we rebel and say: 'Why did the person die? It's unfair!' It’s not a question of fair or not fair, it’s a nasty disease.”
Nearly nineteen years after his death, Fred Chichin nevertheless continued to inhabit his words. On May 1, 2026, the day he would have celebrated his 72nd birthday, she published a video of him on her social networks, still young and full of life. This is what she said: “Fred would be seventy-two years old. 72 years old! We would like to wish him a happy birthday… And even if he is no longer here, on this day I am happy that he was born.”
