‘It’s a tough business – I had a very bleak period’
Peter Capaldi talks to Neil Mccormick about the highs and lows of his remarkable career, and releasing his debut album at the age of 63
B‘The default Doctor now is a kind of cosmic imp’
efore Peter Capaldi was an actor; long before he became celebrated as fierce civil servant Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It or a daunting and strange Doctor in Doctor Who, he played guitar and sang in obscure Scottish punk band B-----ds from Hell. Now, at 63, Capaldi is finally about to release his debut album. “I’m not setting out to make a career change or chase my cousin Lewis up the charts,” he insists. “I’m an enthusiastic amateur having a go.”
St Christopher is a strange and beguiling piece of work, a complex slice of baroque pop-rock and ornate singer-songwriting, its widescreen productions decorated with poetic lyrics delivered with downbeat theatrical flair. “It’s largely the same stuff that was floating round my head post art school, Glasgow, circa 1979, set in neon and rain. Except I’m 40 years older.”
Sitting in a north London café, Capaldi stirs an “extra hot” latte. He’s wearing a sleek black coat over a white T-shirt, his face lean, eyes sparkling, mouth playing with a perpetual half-smile. He draws movie-star attention but blanks it out as he discusses his passion project.
“There’s a tyranny of logic about acting. Your job is to tell the story through the medium of your part as effectively as possible. But it’s somebody else’s story. I enjoy the freedom of music, you can respond to a sound or a tone or a chord and try to construct something that goes with that or against it.” Capaldi’s lyrics playfully grapple with grand themes, from the interconnectedness of everything on Atlanta Vacant Lot to the ephemeral illusions of deluded youth, on the slyly mocking Beautiful and Weird. As a working-class child (his parents ran an ice-cream business) growing up in Glasgow in the 1960s, Capaldi was drawn to acting but didn’t feel equipped. “You go to an audition and they ask ‘what’s your Shakespearean piece?’ I’d never seen a Shakespeare play. So you’re hopeless, because there’s no uncle in the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company], you’re not part of that world, you have nothing except a desire to have a go. So I did apply to drama school but I didn’t get in.”
A teacher encouraged him to apply to Glasgow Art School, where “music swept me away”. The B-----ds turned into the Dreamboys, with future comedian Craig Ferguson on drums. “As we were slightly pretentious art school kids, we were trying to evoke a kind of Dr Caligari dreamscape, but we just sounded like a junior branch of the Chippendales male strippers.” They soldiered on in obscurity for years. Then, while touring as support to Scottish new-wave pop band Altered Images, Capaldi was spotted by director Bill Forsyth.
At 24, he found himself making his film debut opposite Burt Lancaster in Local Hero. “He [Lancaster] was fabulous. He said: ‘Kid, your instincts are terrific! Terrific! But I can’t understand a f---ing word you’re saying.’ ”
Capaldi had a long career as, effectively, an interesting supporting actor. “You look back and go ‘Well, that was a good choice, that was a bad choice’, but really there were no choices. I had a baby and a wife and a mortgage. You’ve got to do whatever comes up.” He won an Oscar in 1995 as writer and director of the short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, but subsequent projects collapsed. “It’s a tough business. I had a very bleak period where whatever initial success I’d had had long failed. There was no work, no money coming in, Oscars had come and gone, Local Hero had come and gone, youth had come and gone. And I didn’t know how to get it back on track.” Then, out of the blue, fellow Glaswegian Armando Iannucci asked him to be in his new sitcom, The Thick of It. “The big lesson I learnt was that you can’t control it, so stop angsting over it. But that’s easy to say now. It wasn’t easy stalking about with no money for a cup of coffee.”
It wasn’t until he was in his fifties and cast as the 12th Doctor that he achieved household-name fame. “My job was to go into work in the morning and battle Daleks. It was fabulous. You get to inhabit the skin of this charismatic, magical creature. Kids look at you and you can see their jaws drop. That’s an extraordinary position to be in.”
Yet he admits to finding the pressure of being recognised on the street quite daunting. “You have to always be positive and good-hearted. My default position is probably a bit more melancholic and reflective, but nobody wants to hear about that stuff when you’re the Doctor.
“I wanted to be a more distant and alien Doctor. Because that’s how I remember [first Doctor] William Hartnell, being a kid in Glasgow on dark winter nights when this strange figure with the white hair and slightly irate voice could open this portal to a magical world. The default now is a kind of cosmic imp. Which is great. But I wanted to touch the dark winter nights. I’m not sure whether the brand supports that any more, but that’s what I was interested in.”
The reign of his successor Jodie Whittaker ends next year, but Capaldi expresses no opinions on who should follow. “One of the great things about doing Doctor Who is it kind of cures you, in the nicest possible way. So I think they’re all great and I wish everybody well, but I’m done,” he laughs almost gleefully.
The revival of his long-dormant musical career is the tale of two doctors, when Doctor Who met Dr Robert (AKA songwriter and producer Robert Howard, frontman of vintage art rockers the Blow Monkeys). The two would play guitar together at parties, and Capaldi became a fascinated observer of Dr Robert’s studio work. Meanwhile, Capaldi’s young second cousin, Lewis Capaldi, was rising to fame as the UK’S favourite singer-songwriter. “Lewis is a proper musician, a really gifted songwriter. He’s been doing that since he was like, 11 or something. I’m very proud of him, even if I don’t really know him.”
Capaldi, who will soon be seen in the Terence Davies film Benediction, about Siegfried Sassoon, jokingly admits he still doesn’t have “a Shakespeare piece” for auditions. “Shakespearean companies have never troubled me with their interest. I know in my heart of hearts, I can act it. But once you get into a production, you are going to be up against people who have been practising the iambic pentameter for the last 30 years.” He shakes his head. “Ach, I could do it! But, you know, it’s such a palaver, they last so long, they’re always like three-and-a half hours long. I’m not bothered.”
His advice for young actors is simple. “Number one, and most important of all, learn your lines. Because if you learn your lines, you have the freedom to tell the story using everything God’s given you. Number two, hang on in there. Because the stars align, sometimes. Look at me. Sometimes you get lucky.”