Everyone has their own favourite Doctor Who. Whovians, in particular, have very strong opinions on that one. Casual fans? Well, it’s hard to look beyond Jon Pertwee; he was Worzel Gummidge and Doctor Who. But guitarists might cite a more contemporary Time Lord, Peter Capaldi, whose Doctor could play a bit on the electric guitar.
It was Capaldi’s idea that the Doctor should play guitar, and the actor/musician has recently shared on Instagram the story of how he found the oddball retro electric that he played during his time as the 12th incarnation of the time-travelling sci-fi hero.
“I’d suggested that it might be fun if Doctor Who played the electric guitar,” he writes. “I imagined he could plug it into the TARDIS console and play very loudly and badly like a teenager.”
It all happened, as so many legendary gear finds happen, on Denmark Street, “the last outpost of Soho’s musical village”. On 17 December 2014, Capaldi, the show’s producer Derek Ritchie and director Daniel O’Hara headed into the venerable guitar emporium Hanks in search of vintage treasure.
Capaldi describes Denmark Street, aka Tin Pan Alley, then and now – as it was and ever shall be – most accurately, a place with “dewy-eyed youngsters and oldsters pressed up against the windows bewitched by some aged Rickenbacker deluxe, beckoning from within”.
When they arrived, Capaldi had a good idea of what kind of guitar Doctor Who should play, only there was a problem.
“I had cited an old Telecaster as the most likely candidate, but they rarely come with tremolos. The Doctor needs a tremolo arm,” writes Capaldi. “And their classic shape produces a sort of ‘get me I’m a rock star’ look, which I didn’t fancy.”
But this is Hanks. If you have ever visited, you will understand that this is the kind of store that you can find anything in. It’s the kind of store you’d go guitar shopping for Doctor Who, and what Capaldi and co found was a guitar so weird that it looks like it he really might have found it in the back of the TARDIS.
“Eventually in Hanks we came across this beauty. It has a whammy bar, mock pearl scratch plate, and funny switches, all of which conspire to give it a junk shop aura,” writes Capaldi.
The guitar in question will be familiar to Doctor Who fans. It might also be familiar to King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard fans, too, because Capaldi’s – nay, Doctor Who’s guitar is a Yamaha SGV-800, the oddball sibling to the oddball SG-2A that KGLW frontman Stu Mackenzie plays.
It’s a beauty, a sort of melted double-cut, with an extended lower horn and a headstock that’s so, well, un-shaped. It was nicknamed the ‘Flying Samurai.’
“I liked it because it looks like someone has had a Fender Stratocaster described to them and then gone off and built their own version,” says Capaldi. “Perfect. And it had a tremolo arm. I loved it. I used it for two seasons of Doctor Who and then, it disappeared.”
Where did it go? Capaldi can’t say. “Vanished in time and space,” he writes. But there are not so many of these around – surely it will turn up somewhere.
Capaldi lists this as the SGV-300. They have the same shape, same finishes, but the SGV-300 would have – arguably – been even better for the good Doctor, because it had this mutant bridge-and-middle single-coil hybrid design, which fused both pickups together (the SGV-800 has single-coils at the neck and bridge), and despite this off-brand bizarro Fender bolt-on vibe, it has the shorter 24.75” scale.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2021, Capaldi said he had envisioned an episode in which the Doctor travelled back in time and met Robert Johnson and Jimi Hendrix.
“I imagined the Doctor might have invented the wah-wah pedal,” he said. “We could’ve done an historical episode where he met Jimi Hendrix and introduced him to this piece of alien technology. I also thought there could be a great blues episode. When Robert Johnson meets the devil at the crossroads, the Doctor could discover something extraterrestrial going on.”
Capaldi tours the UK in February and March. See here for dates and ticket details.
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