WITH her huskily sensual voice and licentious songs about sex and drinking, Cheikha Rimitti broke just about every taboo in her native Algeria.

One of the most colourful characters in world music, she was frequently banned during a singing career that lasted 70 years but she became a legendary figure in North African music and was known as the “mother of rai”, the dynamic fusion of traditional Arabic forms and Western pop.

The rai style was subsequently taken up and developed by younger Algerian singers such as Khaled and Cheb Mami who became international stars. She continued working all her life and gave her last concert in Paris 48 hours before her death. Her latest album was released last week in Britain, and she was due to have performed in London at the Proms in August.

She was born in Tessala, a small village in Western Algeria in 1923. She was named Saadia, meaning “joyful”. The name did not match the reality of her early life, however. She was orphaned as a child and began to live rough, earning a few francs working in the fields and, she later recalled, making her clothes out of the covers of old mattresses.

At 15 she joined an itinerant troupe of traditional Algerian musicians and learnt to sing and dance. Five years later, in 1943, she moved to the rural town of Relizane and began writing her own songs. They described the tough life lived by the Algerian poor, but she also sang about escaping from such miseries through the pleasures of alcohol and sex.

Traditionally, songs of lust had been sung privately by Algerian women at rural wedding celebrations but were considered crude and unfit to be heard in polite society. Rimitti was one of the first to sing them in public and did so in the earthy language of the street, using a rich blend of slang and patois. She eventually composed more than 200 songs but remained illiterate all her life.

Her fame spread by word of mouth across Algeria during the Second World War until she was taken under the patronage of a well-known Algerian musician of the time, Cheikh Mohammed Ould Ennems, who took her to Algiers where she made her first radio broadcasts. Soon after, she adopted the name Cheikha Rimitti.

According to legend, at a festival in Western Algeria she was invited into a tented bar normally reserved for Europeans. Enjoying the hospitality to the full, she kept repeatedly shouting: “Remettez panaché, remettez, remettez!” (another shandy, another and another). A crowd gathered outside and began shouting: “It’s the singer Rimitti”, and the name stuck.

She made her first records in 1952 under the name Cheikha Remettez Reliziana and had her first big success two years later with a song called Charag Gatta, a celebration of carnal love that scandalised Muslim orthodoxy. The nationalist forces fighting for freedom from French rule denounced her for singing “folklore perverted by colonialism”.

When Algeria won its independence in 1962, the Government banned her from radio and television, but her songs remained hugely popular with the working-class poor and she continued to sing privately at weddings and feasts.

It was not until the 1970s that she was first heard outside North Africa when she began to perform for the growing number of Algerian immigrants in France, singing regularly in the cafés of the immigrant quarter of Barbès in Paris. A horrific car crash in 1971 that left her in a coma for three weeks appeared to have diminished her taste for the hedonistic life. In 1976 she undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca, gave up drinking and smoking, and adopted an ascetic lifestyle that no doubt helped to prolong her career.

In the 1990s she was taken up by a new Western audience, under the genre of world music, appearing at festivals and recording with rock musicians. In 1994 she collaborated with Robert Fripp of King Crimson and Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on the album Sidi Mansour, and her profile was further helped by the great success of singers such as Khaled and Cheb Mami, who paid homage to her.

Her most recent album N’ta Goudami, released in 2006, was a lustful combination of traditional Algerian and modern rock sounds sung in a deep voice of booming energy that belied her 83 years and garnered enthusiastic reviews.

She continued performing until the end — two days before she died she was rapturously received by an audience of 4,500 at the Zénith in Paris.

Cheikha Rimitti, singer, was born on May 8, 1923. She died on May 15, 2006, aged 83.