Lewis Capaldi should be on top of the world. Next month he releases a superb second album, Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent, which is guaranteed to be one of this year’s biggest sellers. Its first two singles went to No 1 and tour dates around the world are sold out. The return of the funniest man in music has been met with near universal acclaim.
Yet the Capaldi I meet in a pub in Glasgow’s West End looks thoroughly miserable. Twitching from the Tourette’s that he was diagnosed with last year and nursing a glass of water he barely touches, he reels off a list of ailments like a man three times his age of 26.
“For the past few days I’ve had vertigo,” the Scot says. “I get dizzy and I have to lie down. At midnight last night I was on the phone to NHS 24. I needed to hear that something is not terribly wrong with me.
“My Tourette’s I can deal with because I know that it’s not life-threatening, the vertigo I think is because I’ve had bronchitis, and I’m coming off the anti-anxiety medicine Sertraline. I also have an ear infection. It’s an amalgamation of lots of exciting ailments. Now I’m thinking, what’s next?”
From the clowner Capaldi, as beloved for his banter as he is for his ballads and as adored for his outrageous antics as he is for his everyman manner, finding him on a downer should be a shock. Yet as his fans are about to find out from a Netflix documentary, How I’m Feeling Now, released this week, being Lewis is far from all laughs.
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The remarkably candid, frequently downbeat 90-minute film opens with Capaldi confessing that he has never felt more insecure or self-conscious.
He doubts his ability to write another hit record — his debut, Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent, packed with gruffly delivered piano-led love songs, sold ten million copies, spawned a global No 1 in Someone You Loved and was Britain’s biggest album of 2019 and 2020.
His parents fear for his health as his twitching gets worse. Both beg him to see a doctor. His mum, Carol, 56, a nurse, questions whether fame is worth it and worries that it’s changing her son. His dad, Mark, 56, a fishmonger, ponders whether he’s had a good run and if now might be the time to bow out.
Meanwhile, his managers listen to the songs he recorded in lockdown and imply that they can’t hear a hit. There are uncomfortable scenes with label executives in the US and at a doomed writing session in Los Angeles.
What’s largely lacking is Capaldi’s trademark wit. The star who strode on stage at Glastonbury dressed as Liam Gallagher, served snacks from Greggs to his entire audience after a gig in Glasgow and parodied Wham!’s Club Tropicana video for last year’s chart-topping single Forget Me, does a little larking about his pants, but more often he looks lost.
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Why, you wonder, did he agree to be filmed in the first place?
“Good question,” he says. “The producers approached us and I went along with it. At the time, I was due to go on all these tours so I said they could come and hang out. Bask in my success, hahaha! I imagined it as a pat on the back, my victory lap.
“Then Covid happened and it turned into a film about me making the second record. Along the line, it grew arms and legs. I didn’t want my family in it. Then it was, ‘OK, cool, they can be in it a bit.’ Then it became a deeper look into aspects of my life that even I wasn’t aware of. In a way, it ended up like my career — it just got away from me.”
Even Capaldi, who is said to have made a seven-figure sum from the Netflix deal, was shocked when he saw the finished film. “I never knew I was so deep and emotionally intelligent,” he half jokes. “It is a sad watch. I didn’t expect my life to be so sad.”
Still, he’s hugely proud of it.
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“I love that it isn’t grandiose,” he says. “It feels small and granular. You sense the film-makers are properly living in my back pocket, which they were. They did a fantastic job.”
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The backbone of How I’m Feeling Now, named after a powerful, stripped-back track on the new album about mental health, is still songwriting. We see Capaldi holed up in his parents’ garden shed in his childhood home in Bathgate, a former mining town midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, working remotely with different producers.
He sits in the kitchen playing part of a newly penned song, The Pretender, to his parents, neither of whom is impressed. “Is that it?” his dad asks. “I wouldn’t say it’s one of your better ones,” his mum says.
In fact The Pretender, about the impostor syndrome that plagues Capaldi, is a corker, an upbeat romp that moves him away from the ballads for which he is famous — among them Bruises, Grace, Hold Me While You Wait and the soppy recent single Pointless, co-written with his great mate Ed Sheeran — and will be sung back at him for years to come. If, that is, Capaldi can cope with continuing as a pop star.
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“It’s only making music that does this to me,” he says. “Otherwise I can be fine for months at a time. So it’s a weird situation. Right now, the trade-off is worth it. But if it gets to a point where I’m doing irreparable damage to myself, I’ll quit. I hate hyperbole but it is a very real possibility that I will have to pack music in.”
He survives, he says, by recalling how happy he is on stage, although his Tourette’s is already sucking some joy from the part of the job he enjoys the most.
“My tic is getting quite bad on stage now,” he says. “I’m trying to get on top of that. If I can’t, I’m f***ed. It’s easier when I play guitar, but I hate playing guitar. I know, I’m a walking contradiction.”
While he claims to have also hated making the album — “I didn’t enjoy making the first one either,” he adds — he is rightly delighted by how Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent has turned out. Now it’s over, his impostor syndrome must surely be abating.
“Quite the contrary,” he says. “I feel great at having made a record that I love. I can’t wait to play the songs live. But what I still don’t understand is why so many people come to see me.”
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Yet his gigs are guaranteed to get even bigger. Fans of his debut are well served by a batch of ballads on the new album, but there are also some upbeat surprises that may well win over the as-yet unconverted.
“What I was secretly hoping to do was make the same album as my debut because that did so well,” Capaldi says. “But you get a bit bored, then some Swedes turn up with a synth part and you think, ‘Hey, that could be fun.’ The next thing you know, someone’s playing guitar like Prince.”
The song he is referring to is Leave Me Slowly, that begins a bit Hall & Oates, has a dramatic drum break and soars on a solo that recalls Purple Rain. “I didn’t set out to write that sort of song, but here I am,” Capaldi says. “In not trying to take great strides on this album, a few great strides have been taken.”
Among them are the rocky toast Wish You the Best, the Oasis B side-like How This Ends and the spectacular, strings-backed Any Kind of Life, on which Capaldi’s voice has never sounded stronger.
It is his Scottish growl that is his calling card, plus an ability to craft sing-alongs that appeal to all ages — the front of his gigs are always packed with kids.
Capaldi discovered his love of performing aged four at a holiday camp in France, where he sang Queen songs at karaoke. Aged 12 he formed his first band, but his career only got going when he went solo in his late teens and began gigging across central Scotland.
In 2017 a clip of him singing Bruises at Glasgow’s King Tut’s, the venue where Oasis were famously discovered, went viral and offers from record companies flooded in: 18 months later Someone You Loved spent seven weeks at No 1 in the UK and went on to top the US charts. Capaldi set a Guinness world record as the first artist to sell out an arena tour before the release of a debut album.
Surprisingly, the fame part of success doesn’t faze him. “Being famous is easy,” he says, laughing. “You’re out and about and people say hello. What’s hard about that?
“The pressure of the job is the problem. The mammoth tours of enormous venues. The expectations upon me. That’s surely anxiety-inducing for anybody, never mind a huge hypochondriac like myself.”
The happiest he looks in the film is hanging out with his friends, but he won’t get to do much of that this year. A few days after we meet he’s off to the US and Canada for 33 dates, after which it’s back to Europe and festival season. Plus, he’s had to dramatically cut back on his drinking and been ordered to do daily exercise.
He claims to have drunk only three times this year, but brightens up recalling his most recent night out, on St Patrick’s Day, at an Irish bar across the road from where we are.
He was pictured in a shamrock necklace, posing for selfies with adoring fans and FaceTiming Sheeran, who has just released his own candid documentary and will be going head-to-head with Capaldi in the album charts in May.
“Actually, Ed FaceTimed me and he was having a few himself so that was fine,” Capaldi says. “It was when I got home that I made an idiot of myself. I FaceTimed Chris Martin, I think to ask if he wanted to come to an after-party.
“Thank God he didn’t reply. I don’t even know him. I met him once and he was sweet enough to put his number in my phone. He put it in as Chris Martin (Coldplay), as if I might forget who he is.
“I woke up the next day and he’d sent me a long, lovely note back, saying he was in Brazil and asking if I was OK. ‘If it’s urgent, phone me, much love,’ he wrote. Naturally I spent the whole day riddled with anxiety.
“I also FaceTimed Matt Healy that night. Not so bad. Matty’s more... normal? Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. He’s maybe more up for a laugh. I mean, not that Chris isn’t. For f***’s sake, I don’t know Chris Martin.
“See, I’m doing it again, embarrassing myself. Please can we leave Chris Martin (Coldplay) out of this.”
Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent is released on EMI on May 19. Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now is released on Netflix on Wednesday
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