It was his first time playing gigs since he was 19 – almost 50 years ago – when he was the frontman for Glasgow punk rock outfit The Dreamboys. His tour included dates in Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester and Edinburgh, ending at London’s famous 100 Club: not bad for a 67-year-old who’s been off the circuit for longer than most of his audience have been alive. His most rock ‘n’ roll moment?

“Staying up after midnight – I’m usually in bed by 10 o’clock!” He admires a David Byrne print on the wall behind me, saying the Glaswegian singer is one of his biggest influences, alongside David Bowie and The Sex Pistols. While he’s at pains to impress upon me that the band is not a “new career”, he admits it’s been a lot of fun, especially driving through the night on his tour bus, exchanging “war stories” with the band. Wearing an oversized tan jumper, Capaldi is a natural raconteur, his stretched Glaswegian vowels giving every sentence the cadence of a great revelation.

He gesticulates extravagantly to emphasise his points and often sweeps his mane of grey hair up into an Eraserhead quiff. He lives in London but he’s speaking to me from an upmarket hotel in the countryside where he’s been filming a new show. Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, his most enduring role He’s here to promote Apple TV+’s British crime drama Criminal Record, written by Paul Rutman and produced by Capaldi’s wife Elaine Collins, which will begin its second season later this month.

He plays a detective in the Metropolitan Police whose shady past is dredged up by a young officer played by Cush Jumbo. With its all-star cast and sky-high production values, the show clearly benefits from Apple’s deep pockets but it’s refreshingly free of that streaming sheen, instead capturing the squalor and grime of Hackney housing estates and grim police stations where you can almost smell the Brut aftershave and cigarette smoke. The series explores many of the issues du jour – from police corruption to the rising influence of the far right and the epidemic of violence against women – but it never feels like a bingo card; it unfurls slowly and deliberately, anchored by an ensemble cast that includes Shaun Dooley and Zoë Wanamaker.

Even opposite actors of that calibre, Capaldi stands apart. He exudes that menacing, slightly reptilian energy that made him famous as Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It but there’s also a vulnerability to him, a hint that this man’s life could have taken a different direction. Peter Capaldi: ‘The world is so worrying right now’ Capaldi tells me bringing London to life was key to making it work.

“When I was younger there was a string of really great London thrillers, including The Long Good Friday and Mona Lisa, which both starred Bob Hoskins. They showed London as a place that was alive. It wasn’t just a background.

Mona Lisa came out when I first came to London and it looks exactly like the way I remember Soho. I was trying to get a photograph taken recently for the cover of an album I did and we went to Soho to try and find a scuzzy corner to take some pictures. We couldn’t find one!

We couldn’t even find a seedy doorway!” (They eventually settled for the shot on the cover of this magazine.) Criminal Record, which Capaldi describes as “London noir”, was shot on location as much as possible, occasionally leading to brushes with the locals: “The great thing in London is that people don’t care about you and they get very impatient when you’re filming. That’s actually a good thing: it keeps your feet on the ground.” The cover of Peter Capaldi’s new album Sweet Illusions Given the success of the show – Apple doesn’t release viewing figures but sources say it’s been a ratings hit – I wonder if he was always planning to make a second season?

“If life has taught us anything, it’s that anything can happen. The original idea was for me to die at the end of the first season but Apple said, ‘No, you can’t die’.” Season two pushes further into the themes that permeate the first, exploring how the toxic online ‘manosphere’ can bleed into real life. “The world is so worrying at the moment,” he says, suddenly serious.

“I’m particularly fretful about the amount of violence against women, which I don’t understand. I don’t see how men can pursue an idea of masculinity in which they use their strength to hurt women. I don’t understand where this has come from.

These ideas of ‘strength’ and ‘masculinity’ are adolescent. They’re not what strength or masculinity really are, which is about care, compassion and ha