Music review: Eric Cantona, The Garage, Glasgow

There were times during this Glasgow show when Eric Cantona sounded like a heavy metal vocalist playing a pseudo-sensitive acoustic set, writes Fiona Shepherd

Eric Cantona, The Garage, Glasgow **

Eric Cantona may have been a poet on the pitch as well as an aspiring artist, sometime actor and keen photographer over the years but his music career should never have made it off the subs bench. His debut concert in Glasgow had been downsized, at least allowing for a more intimate club experience; those fans who had ponied up £40 for an audience with King Eric were almost certainly not here due to an appreciation of French chanson.

Cantona looked smart enough in standard crooner garb – Fedora, suit jacket and open-necked white shirt offset with some grizzly facial hair. His gruff baritone, meanwhile, aimed for the Serge Gainsbourg/Leonard Cohen ballpark but landed closer to a Laibach-like rumble. Adopting a surprisingly cavalier approach to rhythm, he sounded at times more like a heavy metal vocalist playing a pseudo-sensitive acoustic set. A new song for Palestine was more tender in tone but not going to trouble the great protest songs.

As a performer, he was mobile rather than agile, pointing and fist-clenching in lieu of any natural dynamics in his songs – all largely tune-free originals sung in English, French and Spanish. On the plus side, he was accompanied by two actual musicians providing pounding piano and searing cello, attempting to carve some sense out of his gnomic utterances.

It is probably kindest to hail his show as a bizarre experience. There were some titters throughout the set from the naughty kids at the back of the hall but also an enthusiastic reaction from those who chose to embrace the eccentricity.

Some of the audience didn’t last the full 90 minutes, but Cantona continued to work the room in overwrought fashion and, at the last gasp, with some humour as he incorporated his infamous “seagulls follow the trawler” press statement into his encore.