Peter Capaldi's Dead*

With apologies to Bauhaus

- Christopher Morley

“At first I thought it should be like a Stratocaster or a Telecaster, one of those old classic guitars, but they all started to look like I was having a midlife crisis.” So said the soon-to-be-outgoing Twelfth Doctor Peter Capaldi of one of the more understated weapons in his performance armoury, allowing him to bring a certain punk spirit to the fore. In another life, around 1980, he had lent what was possibly another of those old classic guitars as well as his vocal cords to the Dreamboys on such cult fare as Bela Lugosi’s Birthday - which quite possibly owes a debt to the first stirrings of Bauhaus, Northampton’s prime exponents of what we know as Goth.

Running with the theme a little, we can turn to sole original Smashing Pumpkin and now sometime professional wrestling entrepreneur Billy Corgan, who when interviewed by Rolling Stone cited they and The Cure as having an influence on his own creative process around the time of Siamese Dream. “It was the ability to create a mood and an atmosphere. The air gets heavier” he said of arguably the most crucial discovery of his high school years. Those very qualities are perhaps best embodied by Capaldi himself in the context of new Who, we might well consider straight from the off. Indeed, he gets a chance to show just the sort of mood and atmosphere he’ll first thrive in in his encounter with the Half-Faced Man, an android desperately scrabbling for humanity by snatching bits of the unfortunate victims of cases of spontaneous combustion, a grisly inversion of Blade Runner’s replicants.

Of course, this is hardly new territory going by the events of The Girl in the Fireplace, some nasty clockwork robots looking to put Madame de Pompadour’s brain to use as the final component of their ship...