‘I can do everything but be humble’: Eric Cantona on his surprise new music career

T ake Nick Cave, add a splash of Leonard Cohen, sprinkle with Serge Gainsbourg and you might have something approximating Eric Cantona’s first single. Yes, you read that right: The Friends We Lost is seriously good. The footballer turned actor turned chanteur whisper-croons his way through a gorgeous meditation on life with a handful of gnomic Cantona-isms thrown in for good measure (“Like a red snake in the water / In mind a winning number / Listen to the silence over the fear / The deep ocean that we can’t hear”). The single is just the start. Next up is a tour, a live album and a studio album.

Cantona tells me that, from childhood, he always hoped to play his own music on stage, but he didn’t think he had it in him. He hadn’t written any music, nor did he think he could sing. But in lockdown he decided to teach himself the guitar to help him write songs for live performances. The albums are by the by – gigging is the main attraction. “I’m still a bad guitarist, but good enough to write songs, and I wrote maybe 30. I did it just to go on stage, because I love the connection with an audience – football, theatre, music. And music, for me, was the dream.”

The infamous kick … Cantona gives Crystal Palace fan Matthew Simmons what for. Photograph: Action Images/Reuters

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it has taken Cantona 57 years to record his first single. He was, of course, the ultimate rock’n’roll footballer. Nobody had such style on the pitch, whether playing with his collar raised like a preening peacock, puffing his chest out to celebrate another wonder goal, or jumping into the crowd to kung-fu kick an abusive spectator. The assault earned him an eight-month ban and a two-week prison sentence, reduced to