Man Utd fan Pete Boyle: My adoration for Reds icon Eric Cantona

I first met him in a hotel in Budapest in ’93. I was just a fan in a hotel. Everyone was getting a photo with the players, who were very friendly. 

 

But then I met him again, when I was recording Songs from the Bathtub [an album of United songs]. You couldn’t just record on your computer in your house like you can nowadays. To go into a recording studio, you had to ring round the Yellow Pages and see what you could afford.

 

The landlady of the Pev, her son Maurice, when we’d had a few beers after the match, he used to get his accordion out and play along with a few terrace hits – ‘Oh, me lads, you should have seen us coming’ [Matt Busby’s Aces] and ‘Eric the King’, which he learned. So we used to play all the time. There’d been football songs before, like Chas & Dave and even New Order, but there’d never been any proper fans’ anthems recorded by a load of lads, without cutting all the swearing out. 

 

One Tuesday night we went down to the Pev to rehearse. It was when Eric was injured. He had the cast on his arm, on his wrist. I think he’d missed a game. Manchester wasn’t a 24-hour city like it is now; the Pev was absolutely dead. We were upstairs in the flat – Maurice playing his accordion and me singing along to these lyrics I’d typed out – and I was singing ‘Eric the King’. Nancy the landlady came up and said: ‘Boys, there’s somebody in the vault you might want to meet.’ 

 

Yeah, whatever. 

 

‘No, you better come down.’

 

So we go down into the vault, and playing table football was Eric and three guys. On a Tuesday night. A lot of people will know me, and that I’m far from shy and retiring! But I just sat down in the pub, nursing my drink, dead quiet, smiling. The guy behind the bar, Danny, went: ‘I’ve never seen Pete Boyle so quiet! Eh, Eric, he writes songs about you!’

 

Eric stops the table football and goes: ‘Do you?’

 

‘Yeah’. And I had all these lyrics in my hand. He looked at me, a bit stunned.