Lizzy Mercier Descloux

With guitarist D.J. Barnes (Didier Esteban), she formed the performance art duo Rosa Yemen and recorded a mini-album for ZE in 1978. Her solo debut, Press Color, followed a year later. Self-taught on guitar, she worked in a minimalist style within the no wave genre, favoring single-note lines, wrong-note harmonies, and funky rhythms. The record didn't sell well, but she toured the USA and Europe. Island Records' Chris Blackwell funded sessions in Nassau, Bahamas, for her second album, Mambo Nassau, co-written and produced with Compass Point All Stars engineer Steven Stanley and keyboardist Wally Badarou. Drawing on African music, art rock, funk, and soul, the album won her a contract with CBS in France, though it was unsuccessful in the U.S.

Back in France, she released two singles, then traveled through Africa. The song "Mais où Sont Passées les Gazelles?" became a hit in 1984, inspired by Soweto's music, and she recorded the album Zulu Rock with producer Adam Kidron. She continued collaborating with Kidron on One for the Soul (1986), recorded in Brazil with jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, and Suspense (1988) in London with Mark Cunningham of Mars. She also composed film scores, acted, and wrote poetry. In the mid-1990s, she moved to Corsica to focus on painting and writing an unpublished novel. Diagnosed with ovarian and colon cancers in 2003, she died the following year. Fellow ZE artist Cristina dedicated a song to her memory on a 2004 reissue, and Michel Esteban later worked with Light in the Attic to reissue her recordings.