In which I offer a great actor some tips in speaking Scouse. This early interview with Peter Capaldi was done in a bar near Waterloo; he was appearing at the Young Vic in the role of John Lennon. It appeared in the NME issue of 13 August 1983.
Capaldi of course became much more famous later on, especially for his part in TV series The Thick Of It. The reference to Daleks, in para three, is in a way prophetic: 30 years later, he became Dr Who.

 

 

He’s an actor, and a good one. He’s a stand-up comic (temporarily retired). He’s also in a group called Big Store, part time. Oh, and once he was a Bastard From Hell.

(The Bastards were, more precisely, from Glasgow and they were his first group. “Musically,” he recalls, “we weren’t that wonderful.”)

But right at this moment, Peter Capaldi is sitting in a pub learning to smoke a cigarette and speak in a Liverpudlian accent. I look on anxiously. When you’re about to go onstage and play John Lennon, well, you can’t risk setting fire to your glue-on droopy moustache, all the while talking like a Dalek with bronchitis.

Luckily, Capaldi’s shaping up OK, lighting the right end, rhyming “book” with “puke” and so on. This Lennon role (in the Young Vic Theatre’s production of Willy Russell’s John Paul George Ringo And Bert) should be another successful step in a career that got its biggest boost when Capaldi landed a leading part in Bill Forsyth’s film Local Hero.

At 25, and still relatively inexperienced, Capaldi welcomes the chance to develop his acting into new areas, if only as a way of testing his potential: “Because I’d played such a prat in Local Hero, and always done funny things, I’d started to think I could only play people who are fools, because that’s what I am and that’s how people see me. But when this came up I thought, Well, somebody thinks I’m capable of something else.”

In John Paul George Ringo And Bert, he plays Lennon through from Hamburg hoodlum to Ono bag-in days – clearly a challenging contrast to the affable pillock he played he portrayed in Local Hero. It’s to Bill Forsyth, though, that Capaldi owes almost everything – for risking an utter unknown to star opposite the likes of Burt Lancaster.

Forsyth had first seen Capaldi at the last-ever gig played by The Dreamboys, a rock’n’roll pastiche outfit who succeeded The Bastards From Hell. An actor at heart, Capaldi had gone into music in his Glasgow Art School days as it was the quickest way of getting on a stage. Still, they did make one single, Bela Lugosi’s Birthday (“we got played on John Peel five times!”), before dissolving under the “degrading” pressures of trying to impress the London music business.

In between all that, and occasional work on the student drama circuit, Capaldi was attempting yet another career as a comedian. This was to culminate in support slots for Altered Images and a national tour with, of all people, Spandau Ballet: “As far as I could see, the audience was all little girls. What you had to do was change all the people in your routines, in your gags, to pop stars. You’d slag off people they would know, like Marc Almond. I mean, if there’s 500 girls out there between the ages of 13 and 18 you can’t go on and say ‘Heyyy! I’m Lenny Bruce!’ It just wouldn’t work for them.”

Capaldi recalls his Spandau tour as “something of a personal disaster – I was out of my depth.” But what finally prompted him to shelve his comic ambitions was an appearance on the C4 chat show Loose Talk: “I shouldn’t have done it. I did this act and it was terrible. The reaction was so bad I retired to bed for three days with depression… Maybe in five years I’ll have learnt to perform it properly.”

In fairness, I thought he wasn’t that bad at all. But the comic’s lot, he says, is a lonely one: “And when you bomb, you really bomb, it’s heart-breaking. Yet it’s great that you can really get pissed and go sit in your dressing room. There’s a great romance about it – the seedy dressing room, the comic who couldn’t make it, the two-bit vaudeville man. Ah, great stuff!”

And so to Big Store, the occasional group he’s formed with Jim and Titch, the ex-guitarist and ex-drummer with Altered Images, plus a girl singer called Tina Winters. They’ve already signed up with producer Martin Rushent, and done some work in his Genetic Studios, but given Capaldi’s other commitments the group is strictly a part-time proposition for him. The acting comes first: “I wouldn’t mind being a pop star, but I don’t want to be a pop star. I don’t have a need to be a pop star.” Nevertheless he hopes they’ll have a record out before too long – he’d like the money.

So for the next few weeks (or longer, if things go well), Capaldi’s appearing at the Young Vic in Waterloo, cultivating his rock’n’roll sneer. The object, he says, is not to try and impersonate Lennon but to bring out a sense of the man’s personality. He hopes that Beatle-buffs will appreciate this, instead of quibbling on details of his appearance.

“I think I’ll come in for a lot of stick in this part,” he frowns. “Anybody would. As long as I don’t get shot…”