Frenchman Eric Cantona is first and foremost a football legend, but after his career he became a painter, actor and now also a singer

A single by Eric Cantona, the former football player, written and sung by himself? It at least aroused curiosity on its release day in June 2023.

So just listen. It could have gone either way, because we knew one thing about Cantona, the now 57-year-old Frenchman: that he was a idiosyncratic, artistic bird of paradise in football in the 1990s. Elusive. A bit crazy, sometimes.

Double-click on the song title… and then we fell silent for a moment. Sober piano chords. A deep singing voice, mumbling cryptic sentences in our ears: “Watch the trees when the others fall/ The hall of love is much too small.”

Cantona sounded a bit like Nick Cave or Leonard Cohen, with a pinch of Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg. Of course he’s not as good as those guys, but still: ‘The Friends We Lost’ turned out to be a surprisingly beautiful and tasteful song.

Debut album

His debut album will be released on March 29. Cantona Sings Eric: First Tour Ever, a collection of live songs, recorded during his first theater tour in France and England. A week later Cantona comes to Belgium: on April 3 he will play in Theater Elckerlyc in Antwerp.

There he flops into the picture: ‘King Eric’, as Manchester United fans still call him. He tilts his iPad until his face is in good view and then jovially raises both hands: Hello, this is Eric. Gray beard, sunglasses with brown lenses. He is at home in Lisbon.

Cantona, the artist

If one football player was ever going to make this kind of music, it had to be Eric Cantona, the man who as an athlete was actually an artist, if only because of the inimitable examples of philosophy with which he sometimes stunned sports journalists.

He wrote poems and turned out to be an accomplished painter. Filmmakers saw him as an actor as early as 1995. He has since appeared in dozens of films and series: from a French ambassador to Elizabeth (1998) to a silent Corsican in the Danish western The Salvation (2014) or, his most famous role, himself in the clever comedy Looking for Eric by Ken Loach (2009). And now: music.

“I grew up with rock, punk and opera,” he says. “Opera because my father loved it, rock and punk because I played records every day with my brother. I loved Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, French bands like Téléphone, but also Sex Pistols and The Clash.”

Own oeuvre

Listening extra attentively is the motto today, because Cantona’s ‘franglais‘ is so punishing that a spoon would remain upright in it, shaking. For him, ‘Sex Pistols’ becomes ‘sex pistol’.

In his own words, he wrote his oeuvre together smoothly. Once it got going, before he knew it, he had thirty songs. And they just kept coming, still. After ‘The Friends We Lost’, more singles followed: first studio singles, then live previews of the album.

“I sometimes listen back to my own songs and I have to say: I am happy with my voice. I like it, to be honest.”

He seems genuinely flattered by the interest in his songs and becomes even happier when it turns out that we have nothing to ask about his football career, but want to talk about music.

Famous karate kick

For the sake of completeness, his football career lasted from 1983 to 1997 and took him from Auxerre, via Olympique Marseille to Manchester United, where he became a superstar and crowd favorite, with his stand-up collar as his trademark. 185 matches, 82 goals, four English league titles and one world famous flying kung fu kick. On January 25, 1995, a Crystal Palace supporter shouted racist nonsense and Cantona came sailing over: straight leg, studs forward, over the billboards.

“My best moment? There are many, but I still choose the moment when I kicked the hooligan,” he once said, only to regret years later: “I regret not hitting him harder.”

So that’s not what today is about. About his songs. Why did he suddenly start writing them after he was 55? Why not sooner?

Writing during lockdowns

“I never had the time or patience to learn to play the guitar. During the lockdowns I finally threw myself into it. I’m still a bad guitarist, but good enough to be able to write songs to my own lyrics. Usually they are there first, usually in English, occasionally in French.”

That is indeed the relationship. On the album, the English-language songs beat the French ones 13-3 and there is also one Spanish-language song, ‘Mi amor’.

“In French I of course have a larger vocabulary and can say what I mean more precisely, but English is a more musical language. Let me say: I almost automatically find English musical, in French I have to look for musicality. Both languages ​​are dear to me. We have recorded fourteen new songs in the studio in recent weeks: seven English, seven French.”

He wrote them all himself, on guitar, to have them performed on stage by two musical accompanists on piano and cello.

“Those instruments provide an atmosphere that suits my songs, but I also want to play with a bigger band in the future, with guitar and drums. That will come, because I am far from finished as a musician.”

Freedom

The word ‘freedom’ keeps recurring: music is freedom, writing lyrics is freedom. It was the feeling of freedom that appealed to him so much when he first heard the man who would become his greatest idol: Jim Morrison of The Doors.

“Morrison mainly influenced me as a lyricist. But I am also inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the avant-garde poet Antonin Artaud. All non-conformists, outsiders. I like mysterious, cryptic lyricism that people have to interpret for themselves.”

The sports press knew that. When they waited hungrily for Cantona’s reaction to his karate kick in 1995, they had to make do with: “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it’s because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you.”

No, dear seagulls, Eric Cantona is not going to feed you sardines from the fishing boat.

Declaration of love

That sentence could have been included in its entirety as a lyric on his album. Wait a minute, it’s there too! The closing song of the album (‘I Love You So Much’, not exactly his best song, by the way) is a declaration of love to the supporters of Manchester United. The second verse begins with the ‘seagulls follow the trawler‘-quote. The crowd in Manchester cheered as he sang those words.

“Playing with that is freedom,” he says. “That is also the biggest difference between football and music. As a football player you have to stick to a tactical battle plan and you are given a specific task by the trainer.”

Cantona was a footballer with an above-average desire for freedom, but the footballer was never as free as the musician/lyricist.

Live

“It is more exciting to sing in front of three hundred people than to play football in front of sixty thousand people, because you bring your own work. I’m excited before a performance, but as soon as I walk on stage I feel great. That is also the reason why I chose a live album: I wanted to get into the halls as quickly as possible and see the people. I used to buy a lot of live albums: Absolutely Live from The Doors, The Song Remains the Same from Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel Plays Live. The interaction, the applause, the energy, the feeling of freedom, that’s what I wanted. Now I have it. Whether that makes a lot of money doesn’t matter to me at all.’