Beyond The Guess Who: Mitsou- "Bye Bye Mon Cowboy"

Each week on Beyond The Guess Who I cover a lesser known or overlooked Canadian artist. This week: Mitsou.

This week’s post is a bit of a grey area. If I were writing from a Franco-Canadian perspective, Mitsou would probably be too famous to write about in this series. Because she isn’t quite as known in my part of the country, I decided to go for it.

45 sleeve for “Bye Bye Mon Cowboy” by Mitsou. Scan is from my own collection.

Growing up, I would usually spend my Friday nights at home watching Retro Boogie Dance Party on Much More Music. I discovered a lot of artists that still get plenty of listens from me to this day: Shannon, Stacey Q, Falco. None of those come off as very good discoveries to the average music snob, but I will defend all of them to the death.

I first heard Mitsou on one of their New Year’s Eve specials where they showed a house mix of “Bye Bye Mon Cowboy”. In the clip, Mitsou wears a lot of outlandish costumes and struts around like a 1960s movie star. I thought she was pretty awesome. ¹

I’ve been into thrifting for years. It started out as a cheap way to buy music in the late 90’s when people were getting rid of their collections to jump aboard the compact disc bandwagon. On one of these trips, I snapped up a cassette copy of Mitsou’s 1988 debut album El Mundo. I remember being shocked that the original single version of Bye Bye Mon Cowboy was different from the remix shown on TV but I still liked it.

Born on September 1, 1970, Mitsou was still a teenager when El Mundo came out. Under her full name of Mitsou Gelinas (her grandfather Gratien Gelinas was a playwright and actor), she had been acting and modelling in her native Quebec since childhood. Most notably, Mitsou appeared on the French Canadian soap opera Terre humaine (which translates to Human Earth).

Moving into music, Mitsou signed with Canadian independent label Isba Records and released “Cowboy” which was her debut single. A video was made, shot on Super-8 film for allegedly $1,800. The single became a radio hit across Canada, a major feat for an artist from Quebec. ²

Two more singles from El Mundo followed: "La Corrida" and "Les Chinois".

Back in the days when mix tapes were prevalent, my brother wanted a copy of El Mundo. At the time, he knew a punk band who wanted to cover “Bye Bye Mon Cowboy”. I went into Wal-Mart to grab a blank tape and made a quick detour to the bargain CD bin. In a moment of perfect timing, I managed to find a CD copy of Mitsou’s 1992 compilation album Heading West instead.

Mitsou’s second album, 1990’s Terre des hommes featured a title track written by Ivan Doroschuk of Men Without Hats fame. Doroschuk also penned the lyrics to her first English language track "A Funny Place (The World Is)".

The album’s first single was "Mademoiselle Anne". It was the video for the album’s second single, "Dis-moi, dis-moi" that raised eyebrows. The video featured Mitsou singing in a bathtub surrounded by nude male physique models. Though it’s pretty tame, the video was banned on Much Music from regular rotation and compared to Madonna’s much racier clip for “Justify My Love”. Interestingly, the Francophone version of Much Music, Musique Plus, did not ban the clip.

Much banning Mitsou and Madonna’s videos from regular rotation led to a 1991 one-off special titled A Question Of Taste. From what I can gather, it was a precursor to their later Too Much For Much discussion specials.

Following the “Dis Moi” controversy, Mitsou appeared in a Frech-Canadian film called Coyote. The aforementioned Heading West followed. The album combined past hits and some new material including a title track co-written by Cyndi Lauper. In 1993, she was scooped up by Disney subsidiary Hollywood Records.

Hollywood was a fledgling label that had mostly only scored success with Queen and minor pop act The Party. They were mostly known for failing to sign Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins, among others. Perhaps the label wanted a Madonna-style pop singer who dabbled in acting. Whatever the case, Tempted, her next album and major label debut, came and went. Hollywood finally scored a hit act towards the end of the decade with Fastball. Despite the album not doing much commercially, it did feature the Rupal-penned single “Everybody Say Love”.

Mitsou returned to focusing on the Francophone market with her next album, the following year’s YaYa. The title track was a French-language cover of the 1961 Lee Dorsey hit. A Christmas album called Noel followed the next year. Following a break, Mitsou released her most recent (self-titled) album in 1999. An EP and further singles followed throughout the years, but she mostly moved into radio and television starting as a morning show host on Montreal’s Energie 94.3 FM.

More media-related work followed: Editing the Quebec magazine Clin d’oeil, hosting the program Au Courant for CBC’s Newsworld, subsequent television work and the occasional acting job. More recently she has started Mitsou Magazine and served as a judge on the Canadian edition of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

When writing these I tend to “what-if” about a lot of artists. While Mitsou: International Superstar would have been amazing, she was smart to refocus her career at the right time and has done well with further endeavours.

1. I found out while researching for this article that said house mix was actually by the legendary Shep Pettibone. Why Going West never used that as a bragging point is beyond me.

2. Because there isn’t the care that people from the UK and the US take in preserving chart info, actual positions from the RPM charts are sometimes hard to come by. I would assume that Mitsou charted outside the Top 40 on the actual RPM charts with “Bye Bye Mon Cowboy”.