Singing Take Me Out at Glastonbury with Franz Ferdinand was like dream, says Peter Capaldi

Peter Capaldi has described playing with Franz Ferdinand at last year’s Glastonbury Festival was “like a dream”.

The Academy Award-winning actor sang the band’s hit Take Me Out live on the Other Stage after being invited by the group’s frontman.

Capaldi was speaking on STV Radio, alongside his TV producer wife Elaine Collins, to promote the second series of their hit Apple TV thriller Criminal Record.

Discussing how the unlikely festival collaboration came about, Capaldi said: “It’s like a dream – did that really happen? They just phoned up and said, ‘Would you like to come and play with us at Glastonbury?’

Peter Capaldi and Elaine Collins STV Radio

“I have my own small music outfit, and Charlotte who plays the bass in my outfit is very close to Audrey who plays the drums in Franz Ferdinand, and I think she’d reported to them that I’d been saying to my band, ‘Look, this has to be like a Franz Ferdinand song. It has to be a heat-seeking missile [and] it has to be really disciplined.’

“So they obviously knew that I was a fan of Franz Ferdinand and that must have got back to them, so Alex [Kapranos] just phoned me up and said, ‘Would you like to come and play with us at Glastonbury?’ I took about two seconds to go, ‘Yes, of course!’

“I didn’t know what they wanted me to sing. There was a song on their new album called The Doctor’s Orders or something and I thought it was going to be some naff Doctor Who tie-in. He said, ‘No, we’d like to do Take Me Out’. I said, ‘What, your biggest hit? Oh god!’”

Capaldi also explained on Ewen and Cat at Breakfast how the Glastonbury experience took him by surprise.

He said: “I hadn’t been to Glastonbury. I love music and all that but I don’t like standing about in wellington boots, not being able to see because some guy has got his hippie chick on his shoulders right in front of me and I can’t see Placebo because of them.

“When we got there, there was this gigantic stage and they said, ‘That’s it’. I thought we were going to be in a tent or something. Then they said, ‘Oh it is live you know’ and I didn’t know that – I didn’t know it was going to be on the telly live.”