Manchester United legend Eric Cantona has always fancied himself as a renaissance man, even if his greatest poetry has always taken place on the football pitch.
Just as he was notorious for going rogue during his soccer career, he has lobbed a bizarre bash at a music career from the leftfield. The results amount to a yellow card offence and the only reason he’s not back in the dugout is that he has brought with him two excellent musicians on piano and cello who just about mitigate the pain of this performance.
Cantona is no singer – never a hindrance for the likes of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Serge Gainsbourg but one of the chief issues with this show. It was hard to tell if Cantona couldn’t hold a tune, or if he just couldn’t write one.
The novelty of being in close quarters with a sporting lion quickly wore off as he stumbled gruffly through a set of unfamiliar original songs in English. French and Spanish. There appeared to be autobiographical lyrics, some lamentations and regrets and a couple of anti-war messages in the dirge mix, occasionally leavened by his mournful whistling or his accompanists’ expressive skills.
Where Love is Hanging Out, for example, was nicely arranged with sonorous pizzicato strings and trilling piano but the Weimar cabaret-like stomp of I Want To See You was better suited to his unsubtle style. He was asking a lot of his audience to sit through this grand folie but those who did last to the encore were at least treated to a witty reference to his infamous “seagulls follow the trawler” quote incorporated into one of his lyrics.
