Artists
Album Info
Release Date: 2021-11-19Label: Monks Road Records
Release comes in a foldout digipak case with album production notes and thank you'salso contains a lyrics booklet inside.
“St. Christopher” is a debut collection of songs by the actor Peter Capaldi, produced by Dr Robert and released on the Monks Road Records label.
Peter is probably best known as the acid tongued Malcolm Tucker on television’s The Thick of It. But in a long screen career he has also played the twelfth incarnation of Dr Who, while recent film roles include “The Thinker” in James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” and Siegfried Sassoon in Terrence Davies soon to be released “Benediction.”
What is less well known is that he started his performing career in music. As a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, he inevitably put together an art school band, and joined the thriving music scene of 1980s Glasgow. The fervour of youth was not quite enough, however, and the band went the way of countless others. But Peter never lost his love of music.
In 2019 Dr Robert of the Blow Monkeys invited Peter to a recording session for the Monks Road Album ‘Humanism’. Peter said, “Watching the musicians work, something drove me to scribble out a song, just for the chance of having them play it, and when they did I knew immediately this was something I wanted to do again. So, I set about it.”
“Robert patiently endured these efforts, encouraging some, letting others slip quietly away, until eventually we felt we had enough ideas to go into the studio… And then it was March 2020 and everything stopped.”
Lockdown forced a rethink. “We had demos, computers, Robert’s address book, and a very clear diary so, through the magic of modern technology, we sent the tracks back and forth until finally, with the help of some brilliant musicians, we found ourselves with something that very much appeared to be an album.”
These songs are the result of Peter’s re-connection with a simple desire to make music again, songs that don’t stray too far from his art school roots. The lure of electric guitars and synthesisers is a hard one to shake.
Keenly aware of his musical gaps, Peter set out to make something honest, using his experience as a writer and director to forge the ideas, and brought to life by the veteran skills of Dr Robert and a group of highly talented musicians. Written largely in the US and recorded in lockdown the album is an opportunity to explore the atmospheric musical ideas that drove him to perform in the first place.
He says, “Whether in the end these songs work is for others to judge. But the chance to try them out, with such skilled musical support, has been a wonderful experience. In some ways absolutely new, but in others… well in a way I feel I’m just picking up where I left off.”