When Manchester United great Eric Cantona makes his live UK debut as a singer-songwriter later this week, one person who won’t be in the audience is Reds superfan Jay Mottershead.
“I love the man,” said the co-owner of long-running United YouTube channel Stretford Paddock. “He’s a god to me. But I don’t want to sit there and watch him sing. What if he’s rubbish? It would spoil his aura for ever.”
Mottershead, it seems, may not have to worry.
As a footballer, Cantona was a glorious, mercurial talent. Now critics suggest that as a musician, he may be much the same.
Following the release of his debut EP, I’ll Make My Own Heaven, the former France international will play two dates at the 480-capacity Stoller Hall in Manchester on Thursday and Friday before moving on to London and Dublin.
And if the reviews from his warm-up gig in the Burgundy town of Auxerre last week are anything to go by, audiences here are in for a treat: Le Parisien newspaper compared Cantona – who was accompanied by a piano player – to none other than Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave.
“Those are two of my favourite artists so I’m very excited to see him,” said Fran Healey, creative commercial director at the Stoller Hall. “We’ve had some very talented musicians play here since we opened in 2017, but probably none has generated quite the excitement – or the publicity – of Eric.”
When tickets went on sale three months ago, they sold out in just 12 minutes. At that point, the 57-year-old – who won five league titles in six seasons in English football – had only released a single song.
Who was buying them all? Stretford End season-ticket holders circa 1992-97?
“I’m sure there will be a lot of people coming who loved him as a footballer,” said Healey. “I suspect a good number will have been regulars [at Old Trafford]. But I think there are a lot of people in Manchester who really respect how he has developed as an artist – a poet, an actor, now a musician – in his post-football career, and I think it will be a lot of those people coming here.”
She expects the gig to be an intimate, atmospheric affair.
“It’s a beautiful space,” she said. “And it puts the performer very close to their audience. They’re not a dot in space. It’s very personal – it generates a connection between artist and audience.”
Of course Cantona is no stranger to connecting with the audience.
In 1995, while playing for United, he famously kung-fu kicked an abusive Crystal Palace fan. (“I have one regret,” he said later. “I would have loved to have kicked him harder.”) He narrowly avoided jail time. One of his new songs refers to the incident. “I’ve been heroic, I’ve been criminal,” he sings on The Friends We Lost.
It is one of the more explicit lyrics from his self-penned repertoire. Others refer to drinking with vampires, red snakes in water and betting with devils. So far, none make mention of seagulls or sardines.
“In retrospect, even as a footballer he was a rock’n’roll star in waiting,” said Pete Boyle, a United fan and himself an amateur musician who, after that 1995 incident, released a song called Eric the King that briefly made the indie chart top 10. “He was dark, moody, philosophical and arrogant, but he was also very likable with it.
“You couldn’t help but admire him – even non-United fans – because he had so much substance beyond football. He was always an artist by temperament.”
Boyle will be going to Friday’s show. “I’ll admit I’m biased,” the 53-year-old said. “If he was rapping nursery rhymes, I’d probably be into it. But even taking that into account, I really like what I’ve heard of his stuff. It’s got a real Lou Reed vibe – the Doors too – but because it’s Eric, it feels authentic. He couldn’t be any other way.”
He could, reckons Boyle, sell out arenas just by talking about football if he wanted. “It would be lovely if he could sell out arenas doing this too,” he said.
Not all of Cantona’s post-football endeavours have been a success, however.
While his acting has been widely praised – his role in the Ken Loach film Looking for Eric was a critical success – his turn at art has sometimes been mocked. In France he has been nicknamed Picasso – and not in a serious way.
Yet for now, who knows what could become of this new guise as rock’n’roll star?
Asked by the BBC if he could imagine himself performing at Old Trafford as a singer, he had a typically immodest Cantona reply: “The Theatre of Dreams? Why not?”
