The former footballer is releasing an EP of four tracks on Friday, which he wrote and composed, before a live album next year. He will be going on tour next week… in Manchester!
He wowed crowds as a footballer, accomplished himself as a painter and proved he could be a good actor. From now on, Éric Cantona is approaching a new turning point in his life by becoming a singer. The former Manchester United star is releasing a first EP of four tracks on Friday October 20, which he wrote and composed, before a live album next year. But above all, “the King” will go on tour next week, with a first date in Manchester. And like everything he does, he launched into this adventure with crazy intensity. Franceinfo met him last Sunday in Auxerre, where his career began.
Éric Cantona concluded a week of residency with a concert, in the city where he trained in football. “Here, it was almost my family’s relay. I arrived from Marseille, 700 kilometers away, I was 15 years oldhe remembers. I arrived here full of dreams that came true.”
Auxerre and Manchester, symbolic places
Auxerre is a highly symbolic place, as will Manchester, the city of his exploits with United, where he will launch his tour on Thursday October 26. Because Éric Cantona sings. His deep and serious voice, on stage, is accompanied only by a piano and a cello. “There are some who tell me: ‘I think of Nick Cave, others of Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits’. I tell them: ‘You think of whoever you want, that suits me very well’he smiles. I never learned to sing and I don’t want to learn.”
As for the pieces he has written and composed over the last five years, he really got into it during the confinements, with a guitar, in English and French, depending on the inspiration, with theatrical accents sometimes, an assumed fragility from time to time. A new way for him to bring out the powerful things he feels.
“I have freedom in what I do, so necessarily, there is consistency. No one decides for me. Obviously, I take inspiration elsewhere, I go see lots of exhibitions, I listen to music, I go to concerts… But at the end of the day, it’s about building your own universehe explains. We enter my world. It’s a vital need for me to express myself.”
“My lyrics talk a lot about freedom.”
Eric Cantonaat franceinfo
And in his personal Pantheon, Jim Morrison and the Doors are never far away. “It was a revelation and it still remains today, for me, the greatest group. We feel this need to express ourselves. They are poets, like Rimbaud. Are these people that we discover or need to discover at a given moment? In any case, our paths crossed. I feel close to them”, he confides.
The twenty songs in stock, which will constitute a live album to be released next year, clearly show all of this. And once again, Éric Cantona is both always and never where we expect him. After already sold out dates in Manchester, London and Dublin, he will be in France on November 3 and 4 in Lyon, November 9 and 10 in Marseille, and from November 14 to 16 in Paris, at the Théâtre de l’Atelier.