Before he was a 66-year-old grandfather of two from Springburn and releasing Sweet Illusions, a brilliant, poetic, electronic-flavoured rock album, Peter Capaldi was an actor. But lest we think this is a dilettante-ish midlife move from a bored thesp, long before he was Doctor Who, Malcolm Tucker, or even (as he says of his breakout role in 1983’s Local Hero) ‘an easy-going buffoon, a gangly youth in a Bill Forsyth gentle comedy,’ Capaldi was a musician.

Back in 1980, a 22-year-old Capaldi was frontman of The Dreamboys, a wild-eyed, wild-haired Glasgow outfit. Their drummer was Craig Ferguson, future American TV chat-show star. One of the tracks from their slim oeuvre, ‘Shall We Dance’, has some 35,000 views on YouTube. When I relay this to him, Capaldi is both appreciative and dismissive. ‘Wow,’ he says. Those thousands of plays? ‘That’s me, mostly.’

One of the top comments under the clip goes: ‘I can tell by Peter's dramatic punk note intonations that he must have been an angsty, artsy teen slash young adult.’ Astute observation? ‘Not bad,’ says Capaldi, a wry, dry figure with a smile forever playing at the corners of his lips. ‘I was more relaxed than that. Having more of a good time than that suggests. Art school was a great place to go to, because it signalled a looseness and creativity that I was very open to. I was angsty, but no more so than was required by my chosen profession. I felt that doing music was a very natural thing to do if you had a creative streak. And it was very available,’ he says, meaning: it was easy to make a post-punk/goth-adjacent racket. ‘The sounds of guitars and drums and all that…’

As a youngster in Glasgow, he remembers struggling to find the music that spoke to him. ‘But then I saw Simple Minds. They’d just been signed, and were at The Mars Bar, just off St Enoch Square. It was a tiny little place. Jim Kerr had his mascara on and his Henry V haircut. They were playing all these weird songs. I thought “I like this. This is me. Let’s go here.” And that’s what I did.’

But he did it only for a bit, with acting soon gazumping rock’n’roll as his primary creative outlet. Four decades on, though, Capaldi’s songwriting flame re-ignited in 2020 during long hours in his trailer on the Atlanta set of superhero film The Suicide Squad. Using a ‘really cheap electric guitar’ and GarageBand software, he channelled long-ago memories into what became his long-delayed debut album, St Christopher.

Now, finally, comes a follow-up. For Sweet Illusions, he decided to push himself ‘a bit harder with the writing. I had no sense, really, of what the whole thing should be. But it’s nostalgic in some way. I gave up music in the early 80s so the songs evoke being in the west of Scotland, and that synthesiser/guitar/neon feeling that was around then.’

And what do we read into the album title? ‘That’s kind of what it is, isn’t it: a sweet illusion? I like the idea very much of being a musician. But whether or not I feel myself as a musician as a religious kind of calling…’ He stops, shrugs and delivers another assessment. ‘I’m not trying to be a pop star. I just like writing songs and working with musicians,’ Capaldi says, adding that there might well be some gigs. ‘It’s a natural extension, to try and do that live. However, I don’t want the obligations of a career. My rule is: if it stops being fun, we stop.’

Sweet Illusions is released by Last Night From Glasgow on Friday 28 March.