As creative off the pitch as on it, no-one can say Eric Cantona hasn’t explored his career options.
Intelligence, passion and charisma served him well on the field, then the film set, and now he’s applying those qualities to music.
The result is something intense and poetic, veering from Piaf to punk via Jacques Brel, Tom Waits and, somewhere in the distance, Dylan.
The performance is raw. Stripped back to just his voice, a cello (Jean-Francois Assy) and piano (Julien Perraudeau).
Anything more would be to gild the lily and risk obscuring what we are witnessing; nothing less than the exposing of his very soul.
As a player, Cantona had the power to astonish and it’s the same here in song. He looks the great themes of life, death and love squarely in the eyes and does not flinch.
From the mournful The Friends We Lost to the hypnotic We Drive, there are stories within stories, each told with a deep, gravelly vocal, straying to a whisper.
Eric Cantona, always with something to say
“I don’t care,” runs the lyric in the bouncy I Want To See You. Oh, but Cantona does care, he always has. About politics, about people.
He has stood against big banks and for the homeless and the disenfranchised.
On Saturday at P&J Live he reiterated his call for a free Palestine with a moving song on the matter.
Finally, an outlet for that all that feeling. Perhaps music is where he was meant to be all along.
His career as a singer songwriter may be new to us, but not to him.
Apparently these two loves were always there and it wasn’t until he taught himself guitar in lockdown that he could usher them in from the wings.
Now is the time to see him. This first tapping of musical creativity has been a lifetime in the barrel and the concoction is heady.
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