Twelve Is A Good One

We begin - and this may not totally surprise you - with a bit of swearing. There’s a line on your new album, I say to Peter Capaldi, that I have to ask about. At one point you sing: “I talk a lot and know f*** all.” Now, tell me, Peter, is that you singing in character or are you talking about yourself?

Sitting in his agent’s office some 400 odd miles south of me, Peter Capaldi - formerly the expletive machine that was Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, formerly a Timelord, formerly of Glasgow but long resident in London - smiles before admitting, “Yeah, that’s true. I do. That’s me.” 

But then he adds, “It’s a lot of people really. That’s quite common.”

Yes, Peter Capaldi has made a record. Another one. After 2021’s Saint Christopher he returns this month with Sweet Illusions which has - as you now know - sweary bits (though, actually, not that many) and guitars and synthesisers and songs called things like The Big Guy and Bin Night.

It’s not really what you expect 66-year-old successful actors to do. Especially 66-year-old actors who are still busy with the day job. Right now Capaldi is shooting a second series of his Apple+ police series Criminal Record and you’ll see him soon in Black Mirror.

Today, though, he’s talking to me, and, yes, he’s talking a lot. About music and acting and ageing and anything else that comes to mind. 

We start with the music. Even though he has previous experience as a musician - back at the start of the 1980s he was in a band with future comedian Craig Ferguson called The Dreamboys - it was still something of a surprise when he released his first album. Clearly, it didn’t scratch the itch and now he’s back with another.

The explanation is simple enough. “I enjoyed doing the first one so much I just wanted to carry on doing it,” Capaldi explains.

“When I was a kid, if you wanted to record an album you had to be signed to a record label. I essentially do this myself. I have collaborators who I work with, but essentially if you have a computer and you’ve got GarageBand or Logic you can start to put songs together.

“I take it seriously but lightly, if you know what I mean,” he adds. “My intention is not to have a new career or be a pop star. It’s just a creative thing that is very accessible.”

It was his friend and producer Dr Robert - once of The Blow Monkeys - who first encouraged Capaldi to start writing songs. And now Capaldi can’t stop.

“I read that the only way you get a good song is by writing a hundred terrible ones. I think I’m still working my way through the hundred.”

That’s self-deprecation at work. Sweet Illusions is far from rubbish. Ask him to describe what it sounds like and he says, “It’s fairly nostalgic guitar and synth tribute to eighties Glasgow. That’s what I think it is. Because I’m really picking up where I left off,” referring to his Dreamboys days 40 years ago. 

But it’s also the work of a man in his mid-sixties. It’s unlikely that the twentysomething Peter Capaldi would be writing a song called Bin Night after all.

“I’m a big fan of bin night. The night, not the song,” he quickly adds. “Because the world is chaotic, and terrible things are happening, and there’s only five minutes you get when you can exercise any control over your fate. And that’s bin night. If you get your bins together and you get them all out, you think, ‘Well, I’ve done something constructive.’”

More than that, though, Bin Night is also a love song to his grandchildren. “I became a grandfather. I wanted to do a lullaby because I have babies back in my life again.”

There is a lot of love on the album, it’s worth saying. If you have a tendency to conflate Capaldi with the parts he plays you might be surprised by quite how romantic it is. As he sings at one point, love is all that matters.

“Yeah, it’s love that matters. That’s not a new line to have in a song, but you can do it in a song and it’s easier than doing it in a film or on stage. You can fill things with your own emotions.”

It’s possibly worth remembering at this point that Capaldi has been married to his wife Elaine Collins, herself an actor and now a TV producer, since 1991. They have been through the highs and lows of a life in acting together.

That twentysomething singer in The Dreamboys, I say, does he feel very far away from you now, Peter?

“Not very far. I mean, physically, yes. Because I’m an actor I get to see how I look and I’m always horrified to see this old guy with white hair. I don’t know where he came from. I don't imagine myself as that, but the parts I get are like that. I don’t feel that old.

“The younger one is still there. The optimism is a bit more crushed. I went to the art school and at the time there was a great ethos of just having a go. It wasn’t just the art school. I guess that’s what the whole post-punk thing was, so I still carry that.

“It doesn’t matter if what you do is great, what matters is you tried.”

The son of Nancy and Gerald John, who ran an ice cream business, Capaldi’s desire to be creative can be traced back to childhood in Glasgow.

“I could always draw from when I was little. I remember my granny felt that drawing was an Italian thing. She was talking about Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, not the son of an ice cream van vendor.

“But when I was little I remember I had a shoe box and - this is how long ago it was - I cut the front off of it and made a wee studio in it. It was Ready Steady Go, a programme that was the precursor to Top of the Pops, and I drew little people; little John, Paul, George and Ringo, and a camera and all that.”

What he wanted back then, he says, was not to be an actor or a musician. It was simpler than that. “I wanted to be on the telly. I wanted to be part of that whole thing.”

What eventually happened was that he met the film director Bill Forsyth who gave him a role in his film Local Hero.(Image: unknown)

"I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him and a lot of people wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him,” he says of Forsyth. “My career is thanks to him.”

Everyone asks you about Doctor Who and The Thick of It, I say, but what I really wanted to speak to you about was Ken Russell’s incredibly camp 1988 vampire movie Lair of the White Worm which also starred Hugh Grant and Amanda Donohoe. What was it like working with Russell, the master of excess?

“It was great. We laughed so much. Hugh Grant was so funny. Such a smart, witty guy. He’s great company. Great cast all together, happy days.”

As for Russell himself, “he’d be fine in the morning and then at lunchtime he’d go into his trailer and he would emerge as the enfant terrible of the sixties. I don’t know if he had been quaffing champagne, or what had gone on at lunchtime, but he was mad then. He would push the cameraman off the camera and he would take over.

“I remember he was very serious about that film. It subsequently became well known as a comedy, but that wasn’t intentional at the time.

“It was a wee bit weird. I’d stumble onto a stage in Shepperton and there were some quite racy sequences that didn’t appear in the film being shot.”

Capaldi had his own ambitions as a director. In 1992 he wrote and starred in the romcom Soft Top, Hard Shoulder alongside Collins and a year later he wrote and directed the short Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life which won him an Oscar at the 1995 Academy Awards. At which point he was being courted by the Weinsteins and a career as a Hollywood hot shot seemed just a contract away, only for the Weinsteins to renege on the offer.

“I think it was for the best,” he says now. 

“At the time it was difficult. The rug’s pulled from under your feet. But if I’d done that I wouldn’t have gone back to acting and I’ve enjoyed acting so much since then.”

Still, a year to the day after winning an Oscar, he told Kirsty Young on her Radio 4 show Young Again in 2024, he was shooting a local dog food commercial.

“We had to shoot it within the range of the M25, the ring road that goes around London, but the product was from Cornwall,” Capaldi recalls when I bring it up. “I had to find a farm and a field and a dog because we didn't have enough money to go any further than that

“And the client, who was from Cornwall, said the soil was the wrong colour. ‘This is brown, the soil in Cornwall is red.’ What am I supposed to do with that information? So I thought I don’t want to spend my life doing this, apologising for the earth.”

What followed were what we might call his Midsomer Murder years; guest parts in TV series and small parts in films. 

“I think I was a bit disappointed,” he says of that time. “You start to go, ‘Oh well, I’m not going to do those great parts or whatever. I’m just going to be a bellringer in Midsomer Murders.’ And there is a delight in that, a grace and a dignity in that. And I love that in actors. They really get knocked about. They’re up and down. They’ve got mortgages to pay and look after their kids. I can see it in their eyes.”

Of course at that point he was also sharing a house with another actor. 

“That was where Elaine’s production career started because there was a period there where I really wasn’t earning anything. She made some enquiries with some friends who were working in production and she got a job reading scripts and doing reports for the BBC. And they were so impressed by her they said, ‘There’s a job going.’ A script assistant or something in the drama department. ‘Would you come in and try and go for it?’ “That’s how she eventually ended up becoming a producer.

“She’s my boss just now,” Capaldi says, referring to Criminal Record. How is that?

“She’s great. The show that we’re doing now I really enjoy doing. It’s very demanding,very modern, and the subjects that it deals with are hard. 

“And that all comes from her. Crime wasn’t a particular interest for her, but she’s extremely well read. People would come into the house and go, ‘Oh Peter, all these books, you must be very well read.’ I have to go, ‘They’re Elaine’s books. They’re not mine. My books are the Doctor Who annuals over there.’”

Have you written a song for her yet, Peter?

“Many songs. Many, many songs on the album.”

It was being cast as Malcolm Tucker in Armando Iannucci’s scabrous political sitcom The Thick of It that heralded the second act of Capaldi’s career. Those fey, gangly, awkward young men he played in his twenties were now pushed aside as he became the fire-breathing spin doctor with a caustic line in sweary putdowns.

“That’s just what life does to you. I couldn’t have played that part until the time I played it,” he suggests. He needed to have experienced the “various kickings” life had in store for him, he says, to be able to play Tucker

“I knew by the time I came to play that part that things could go wrong. I was tougher, I was a different person. That helped ignite Malcolm.”

It is now 13 years since he said goodbye to Tucker, eight years (and two Doctors) since he handed the keys of the Tardis to Jodie Whittaker. Capaldi has now moved into the veteran-stroke-legend part of his career. Or, as he would have it, his don’t-give-a-stuff years.

That’s what’s great about being in your sixties, he says, you don’t care anymore.

“Physically, you can’t escape the fact that things can get a little bit tougher. But, as yet, that hasn’t really impacted me. I get a bit knackered, more knackered than I used to.”

He pivots to the personal. “I love having grandkids. I love … I wouldn’t call it wisdom …There’s a kind of understanding, a perspective, about what’s important and what’s not important which you don’t have when you’re younger and I welcome that very much. You don’t waste your time. You’ve only got X amount.”

He smiles again. “It’s funny, my wife …” he begins, “I’ve never been obsessed with death or the ending of life. I think she’s been obsessed with it since she was a kid.

“So, it’s only recently I’ve begun to realise, ‘Oh, right, so this doesn’t go on and on and on. There’s a point where this ends.’ And if you’re lucky it ends neatly.

“So I am conscious of that, but it just makes me want to enjoy life more, be a part of life. 

“I’m very, very lucky because the shows that I’ve been involved in - obviously Doctor Who, but also The Thick of It -  have a large appeal to young people. So I have a lot of young people talk to me. And also with the music, I’ve got a band who are all so much younger than me and it's great to be part of all that, to be in that world.

“And it's very stimulating rather than just locking the doors and saying, ‘I'm going to be old now.’

“Is it a struggle? I don't know. It’s a struggle sometimes because it's physically a bit tougher. But I don't find that I struggle psychologically. Other than the ticking clock.”

Towards the end of last year Capaldi returned to playing music live with a gig in Stereo in Glasgow. He’s not sure if he’ll do many more.

“I’m not trying to have another career, so I don’t really want to have a big tour. I don’t want a pile of people I have to answer to. So, we’re going to do Belladrum Festival in August and that’s great. The big band’s are on the big stage and we’re on a little stage and that’s perfect. 

"And hopefully we’ll do a couple of gigs before that as well.”

Maybe you could see the current chapter in Peter Capaldi’s life as a sort of homecoming. He’s reconnecting with that young musician he once was. And he is also reconnecting with his own origin story in Glasgow.

“I’m in Glasgow much more now than I have been for years. My daughter, who was born and raised in north London, has moved to Glasgow with my grandchildren. Because although she was a north London girl her granny was in Glasgow and she’d come to Glasgow to see her granny who’s no longer with us. So she’s very familiar with the place. She loves Glasgow, she loves the scale of it, the kids love it, so we’re spending a lot more time there.”

There’s a sense of circularity in that, he admits, and a reminder of the city that made him who he is.

“I love Glasgow. The thing is you carry it with you anyway. Glasgow is part of me and I’m happy about that.”

Peter Capaldi talks a lot and, it turns out, he does know a thing or two. Whatever he might sing.

Sweet Illusions comes out on the Last Night From Glasgow label on Friday. 

Credits:

With thanks to the Lord Palmerston Pub, Dartmouth Road, London.

Blue shirt and both suits by Edward Sexton, plum shirt by Paul Smith.