Of all the actors who have played Doctor Who, only one was in a late-70s punk band called The Dreamboys. “It was me and some friends from art school,” says Peter Capaldi, the Time Lord in question. “We really didn’t realise how much work it took to make it in the music business.”
As his acting career blossomed the band fell off, but the 67-year-old Glaswegian has returned to music in recent years, releasing a pair of albums – 2021’s St Christopher and 2025’s Sweet Illusions – and completing a UK tour earlier this month.
“I don’t want to seem like some Johnny-come-lately,” he says. “I’m just doing this for fun.”
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The first music I remember hearing
I grew up in a musical household. My father played the piano, my uncle Peter played a guitar, my uncle Joe played the accordion and my uncle Gus did comedy skits. They were essentially a band.
The first song I performed live
It was with Bastards From Hell, who became The Dreamboys. It was probably Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols. Punk was in the air and that was the thing that was energising us. I went to art school in 1976. When we arrived we were all dressed like Neil Young with the long hair and the army-surplus greatcoats. Then punk exploded, so we all came back with peroxide hair and pierced ears.
The songwriter
Roy Orbison. His songs have an echo of country and western in them, but he introduces a kind of cinematic, poetic quality into them. [Singing the beginning of In Dreams] ‘The candy-coloured clown they call the Sandman’ – it sound like he’s pushing the door into the subconscious. Or Crying, which sounds very simple, but it keeps revolving and evolving and moving higher until the emotions reach a kind of fever pitch. Not many people can pull that off while also having great hair and brilliant shades.
The guitarist
Neil Young. It feels like he mainlines emotion in his playing and in his solos. It’s almost like he’s not interested in demonstrating his technique. It sounds like he’s just strapped on the guitar and has this raw electric sound. But the notes he chooses, and the shift from one to the next, can be quite heartbreaking. He communicates at a very deep emotional level with the electric guitar.
The singer
I’m sure lots of people say this, but it has to be Bowie. He has this quality I love - and Bob Dylan has this as well – which is that you hear that voice and you know it’s him. It can’t be anyone else.
The greatest album of all time
It would have to be Lou Reed’s Transformer. I was a little bit late to people like Bowie and Lou Reed – I was more into Slade at the time. But part of what punk was about was finding an identity, and that’s when I started to listen to people like Lou. He was describing this very cool world on Transformer – a little bit dangerous, a little bit glamorous, very adult. But to me, the production [by David Bowie and Mick Ronson] has a very British, kind of music-hall quality to it – each song is presented in quite a theatrical way.
The best live album
Bowie’s Station To Station was the first album of his I heard, so I thought I’d go back and explore his other music. So I went to the record shop and bought David Live. Looking at the tracklisting, I thought it was going to be versions of his songs presented faithfully. Which they absolutely weren’t, they were strange, strung-out versions with bits missing and different arrangements. But his voice just pulled me in. He had such range and terror in it at that point.
The most underrated band
For me it’s probably The Cramps. They were a psychobilly band, playing this kind of Louisiana swamp punk. They had all kinds of horror movie things going on, and their lead singer, Lux Interior, was this colossal, Eraserhead-ish figure.
My guilty musical pleasure
That’s quite a tough one. While I was at school, you couldn’t listen to ABBA because that would be immediate social death, but I quite liked them. And Mike Oldfield, who was very uncool. But I do like Ommadawn and Tubular Bells.
My Saturday night party song
I think Anarchy In The UK is still astonishing. Before we’d even heard the Sex Pistols, we’d been fed the idea that they were musically inept. Which just isn’t true. Their sound, their heart, their attitude, that voice – it’s like something from another world.
The song that makes me cry
It’s a song by Donny Hathaway, a live version of You’ve Got A Friend [written by Carole King, and recorded as a duet between Hathaway and Roberta Flack]. His voice is amazing, but the entire audience joins in – and they join in fully to the point where he stops singing. You could say that song is a bit of easy listening, but it actually expresses some of the most powerful emotions you can have. That song makes me cry.
The song I want played at my funeral
Get It On by T.Rex. I expect there’ll be people there weeping, heartbroken that the Big PC is gone [laughs], so I’d want to send them away with a smile.
Peter Capaldi's album Sweet Illusions is available via Last Night In Glasgow.
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