Tour de France accordionist

Born: September 22, 1922

Died: June 11, 2018

Although she recorded more than 150 accordion albums, Yyvette Horner, who has died aged 95, was best-known as the official mascot and “soundtrack” of the Tour de France bicycle race during its heyday in the 1950s and 60s.

She became something of a French national treasure over her six-decade career, dubbed La Reine du piano à bretelles (the Queen of the piano with braces, a French nickname for the accordion).

Ms Horner was the most famous face and sound on the miles-long “caravan” of advertising publicity vehicles which preceded the cyclists in the days when Le Tour was probably the best way to advertise products in front of tens of millions of roadside fans before the boom in TV advertising.

Her role was to stand, colourfully-dressed and harnessed, on the roof of a van, usually a Citroën Traction Avant, playing light but lively musette-style music for hours on end to entertain the crowds with accordion music while advertising Calor electric irons. She often suffered sunburn or got soaked to the skin, her arms would ache from the 15kg weight of her instrument and heavy rain sometimes made her accordion keys stick together.

During the overnight stage stops, she had to continue to play in town or village squares into the wee hours to keep the fans happy. In what was very much a male chauvinistic sport, she was pretty much the highest-profile woman on the Tour. Her music helped set the mood for the event along the roads of France, both up mountains and on the descent.

Yvette Hornère (she later changed her professional name to Horner) was born on September 22, 1922, in Tarbes, close to the Pyrénées mountains and the border with Spain, a small town which became a hotbed of resistance to the Nazis during World War Two. Her father was a builder but her maternal grandparents had run a theatre company, installing in her a love for music. “I was born during a rehearsal,” she once said.

She learned the piano as a child and trained as a classical pianist but was persuaded by her mother to take up the accordion. She was 26 when she became the first woman to win a world championship accordion event in Lausanne, Switzerland, playing not only French music but classical and jazz. Performing well into this century, she played at concerts and on TV, eventually selling, by her estimate, 30 million records in France alone.

According to the Guardian, she recalled her Tour career thus: “Sometimes I had to take mosquitos out of my nose, sometimes I was grubbier than the stage winner, and when it rained I had only a hat.” She recalled sometimes putting a life-size model of herself on roof of the van when she was totally exhausted but the fans were not fooled for long.

Her last Tour de France was in 1965. She felt that rock music was making the accordion rather passé and so opted for recoreding and concerts. Her glitz and somewhat camp appearance, latterly with a bright orange pompadour hairstyle, dazzling Gaultier outfits and huge sparkling rings on every finger, made her a perfect accompanying musician for Boy George when they once performed Gershwin’s Summertime on French TV. She was 71 at the time. She went on to record tunes by pop starts from David Bowie to Michael Jackson, and even some rap.

Ms Horner’s memoirs, Le Biscuit dans La Poche, was published in 2005. She was appointed to the Légion d’Honneur by then president Francois Mitterrand. Her husband, René Dresch, died in 1986. They had no children. She is believed to have died at her home in the Paris suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne. Asked for the cause of death, her agent Jean-Pierre Brun replied: “She died from a life filled to the brim.”

PHIL DAVISON