“I feel close to the rebelliousness and vigour of the youth here,” Eric Cantona supposedly once said of his adopted city. “Perhaps time will separate us but nobody can deny that here, behind the windows of Manchester, there is an insane love of football, of celebration and of music.”
That is possibly an apocryphal quote — the best citation that a quick trawl through Google brings up is a novelty T-shirt website — but when it comes to Cantona, whether or not this or that is real is not always the point, so long as it embellishes the legend.
It is tempting to view the latest reinvention of the most unconventional figure in Manchester United’s modern history through that same lens. Last week, for two nights only, he was back in town, celebrating the city’s other “insane love” but in a new guise. This was Eric Cantona, the singer.
Music has always been part of Cantona’s life, from his youth dancing with the guitarists on the beaches of the Cote Bleue near his grandparents’ home. As a teenager, his discovery of Jim Morrison sparked the rebellious streak that defined him as a player. He has previously revealed that standing up at the breakfast table and singing to his wife and children is a part of his morning routine.
Now, he was swapping that breakfast table for Manchester’s Stoller Hall. Tickets sold out for these two nights in less than a quarter of an hour and you wondered whether many, if any, of those enjoying a pre-show drink in the lobby will return for the forthcoming gigs advertised around the venue. With all due respect to Polish instrumental ensemble Kroke, they might not be as big a draw.
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‘Hello, I am Eric.’ An interview with Cantona
After all, despite Cantona’s debut EP I’ll Make My Own Heaven being perfectly listenable, this crowd are here for the man rather than the music. Some have paid hundreds for a ticket. One remarks that they just “want to breathe the same air” as him. When a stray £10 note is found near the bar and nobody immediately claims it, one punter asks: “What would Eric do?”
Cantona in full verse (Tim P Whitby/Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images)
Pete Boyle, the United fan and renowned terrace songsmith, was one of those in attendance and he sums up why, more than 25 years after his departure from Old Trafford, hundreds will still flock to watch their idol.
“When I grew up watching footballers — apart from Pat Nevin and Brian McClair — they all used to say, ‘Favourite meal: T-bone steak; favourite music: Hot Chocolate or ELO’ and all that,” he says. “To have somebody a bit different, someone who was a bit more mysterious… Pat Nevin and ‘Choccy’ were great but Eric was different.”
When a five-minute warning sounds over the PA system, drinks are downed and the queue for the gents’ toilets threatens to stretch down the corridor. It is, as one voice in line puts it, “just like being at the match”. But aside from a short blast of Boyle’s “Eric the King” as a throng of fans file into the auditorium, the crowd quickly settles into a hushed reverence.
Eventually, the lights go down and two figures appear on stage — one a pianist and the other a cellist who, in the low lighting, bears a resemblance to the man everyone is here to see. Yet as soon as the real Cantona enters the room, emerging on a balcony above the stage, his aura is unmistakable.
Cantona appears with arms outstretched, dressed in a long navy overcoat, a white shirt, red velvet tracksuit bottoms with trainers to match, and a trilby hat — once more demonstrating his idiosyncratic but indisputable sense of style.
Cantona on stage (Tim P Whitby/Getty Images)
He then descends down a staircase with one arm held aloft, receiving the raptures of the crowd. At the bottom, he runs into a latecomer still making his way to his seat who wants to shake his hand. Despite the considerable concern of the venue’s security staff, Eric obliges and shares a quick word. And then, onto the stage.
Can he sing? Yes, sort of. His voice is deep and low and, in that way, its range is limited. The majority of his 90-minute set is conducted through a gravelly Gallic whisper, aside from a few interludes of tuneful whistling. And whatever there is to be said about the singing, he is an excellent whistler.
Any reference to United in between songs is predictably lapped up — “From the Theatre of Dreams to another theatre of dreams,” he declares early on — but they are few and far between. Surprisingly, there is only minimal interaction with the audience all evening. Good-natured heckles go ignored.
Cantona instead embarks upon a performance that is a total commitment to the art. Those who go through the doors early enough were handed a ‘livret de chansons’ that reveals, impressively, that all of the 21 songs in the set list were written by Cantona himself. There are no cheap crowd-pleasing cover versions here.
Many of Cantona’s songs are tender, sombre and introspective. There are reflections on love and war, politics and culture, life and death. Though penned before the death of Sir Bobby Charlton the previous weekend, there is a palpable poignancy in the room for the mournful “The Friends We’ve Lost”.
But among the weighty subject matter, there are reminders that you cannot take this too seriously. In “Nowhere (Bang Bang)”, the borderline nihilistic message is lifted by some typically absurd moments. “I feel like a lizard, I’ve never been a lizard,” Cantona muses, “but I can imagine, because I drink, a Sex on the Beach, in an empty place.”
One of the more mischievous offerings is “Where Love is Hanging Out”, with its “scents of night life”, “intoxicating” dancers’ bodies and “delightful ecstasy, sublime ecstasy”, all of which comes across as a playful nod to that other great cultural export of 1990s Manchester. But the highlight of the evening is the inevitable encore.
After departing for all of about 10 seconds, Cantona returns to the stage to close on “I Love You So Much”, the most explicit tribute to Manchester and his United career yet. “I arrived, called by the press, the brat, the craziest,” it begins. “Then I gave, all I could, with all my friends, to make you proud.”
When the second verse starts with “When the seagulls, follow the trawler…”, the room erupts. Cantona recalls how the press — those ‘seagulls’ baffled by that infamous line — called him the greatest philosopher. There is almost just as loud a cheer for the next line: “I think, they were, completely”, dramatic pause for effect, “right”.
It is a literal showstopper, the ideal way to go out, but now a crowd that has sat and listened for the last hour and a half is on their feet with songs of their own. As Cantona poses for a picture on stage with a young girl wearing one of the latex masks popular among United fans in his heyday, “Ooh, ah, Cantona” rings out.
The former Manchester United player commanded the room (Tim P Whitby/Getty Images)
The chanting carries on after Cantona exits stage left, with many looking up in Boyle’s direction on the front row of the rear balcony. Or perhaps at Cantona’s family, who are sat a few seats away from him, singing and clapping along. Once a full-throated rendition of “12 Days of Cantona” in its entirety is done, those remaining in the auditorium finally make their way to the exits.
Boyle knows Cantona well, having first met him in the Peveril of the Peak pub in Manchester city centre, “playing table football on a Tuesday night”. He admits he is biased but left impressed.
“It was the opposite of a footballer having a novelty single out, like Glenn Hoddle or Kevin Keegan, releasing a song on the back of your popularity. It was nothing like that,” he says. “It was someone who’s taken it seriously, who’s being serious about what he wants to do.”
And though Cantona’s name has undoubtedly been the draw, Boyle thinks many left with an appreciation of the music too.
“I’m not saying this is the Velvet Underground of this generation or anything but people shouldn’t prejudge it and think it’s people that are reminiscing, getting nostalgic about their favourite footballer,” he says.
“That might have been the reasoning for many people to attend initially, I accept that, but to me he’s a guy who takes everything he does seriously, like football, and he puts everything into it and you’ve got to see it to believe it.”
So yes, this is real. It is also surreal. Is it a serious stab at a musical career for an ex-footballer who is also an actor, an artist, a philosopher? Maybe, maybe not. But as ever, that is not really the point. Because whatever you want to call what that crowd had witnessed at Stoller Hall, it was unmistakably Eric Cantona.
(Top photo: Tim P Whitby/Getty Images)
