For more than three decades, David Duchovny has been a pop culture icon, thanks to his role as Fox Mulder in the alien conspiracy series The X-Files. But this weekend he is going to show British fans a whole new side to himself: as a rock star.
The actor, who has also written novels and hosts the podcast Fail Better, still marvels at his move into music. “It’s ridiculous. It just goes to show that you never know. That you don’t know what path you’re walking down, or how far it goes.
“It’s an amazing thing. I wish I’d known this shit when I was younger: always go down different roads, different branches. Go out and fail and fail and fail, and keep failing. Just keep trying different things.”
Tomorrow night, he and his band play the 2,000-capacity O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire before heading to Latitude Festival in Suffolk on a weekend line-up that also includes Duran Duran, Kasabian and Rag’n’Bone Man.
This may be a surprise to many, but Duchovny has actually been making music for almost a decade and has already released three albums, the most recent, Gestureland, in 2021.
He’s also done two European tours which stopped off in London and has been embraced by the fans. “It’s gone really well. Though at Latitude, when people are waiting for Duran Duran, we’ll see how positive they really are about me being on stage.”
For someone who built his career in front of the camera, and now behind it too, what’s it like to play for a live audience? “It’s just a different performance,” says Duchovny, who looks at least a decade younger than his 63 years. “I think of each song as a scene or a character. I’m really just trying to connect… That’s what my focus is on. Oh, and sing the songs the way I wrote them, and not f**k them up too bad!”
The band plays their back catalogue and a few covers – on their last tour, they covered Alice Cooper and The Velvet Underground. They’re also writing a fourth album and plan to “bust out a few new tunes” from that – but there’s no reminiscing about his acting past between tracks, however much X Files and Californication fans may be desperate to hear them. “It’s just a rock ‘n’ roll show,” he says simply.
His music is inspired by all sorts of musicians from his youth, he says, from Bruce Springsteen to Sly and the Family Stone, and, particularly, The Beatles. “I was heavily into the British Invasion,” he says.
Yet, two unfortunate childhood incidents meant Duchovny, who grew up in New York, stayed away from music until his 50s. One was being rejected from the Grace Church School choir when he was 10. He failed the audition for a choir which he’d been told no one was rejected from, after misunderstanding the instructions. He was, he says, humiliated.
“I didn’t think I would ever sing, certainly not recording.” But in recent years he has worked with a voice teacher. “To a certain extent, it can be muscular if you don’t have a natural gift for it. So I’ve done all I can. I do the best that I can and I’m amazed that I can do it at all because of that Grace Church choir failure.”
That same year he had some uninspiring guitar lessons with a teacher who was less than engaged, and he gave up. “But ultimately it was on me not to give up the guitar, not on the teacher.”
So he left music behind and instead became one of the most famous faces on TV in the Nineties alongside Gillian Anderson as they played Mulder and Scully, a pair of FBI agents investigating the paranormal in The X Files. The show ran from 1993 to 2002, and then returned from 2016 to 2018.
Asking about how he looks at the show now he says, “The way I think of it, it was such a central show in its time in the consciousness of its culture and the world… It was a show that was even more popular abroad than it was in America. It’s like the British Invasion was to me – it got in me because it was the music of my time – [and] that was the show of a lot of people’s time; it’s still in them.
“I don’t disrespect that. I appreciate that and give all the credit to [the show’s creator] Chris Carter and the writers,” he says. As well as tapping into the zeitgeist of the time, “even now it’s still relevant… because of all the conspiratorial conversation that’s going on. 30 years ago, he was reading the tea leaves. It’s like Animal Farm or War of the Worlds – it’s one of these amazing feats of artistic forecasting.”
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When asked if he would return to the character again, he is unsure. “I’m not saying never, and I’m not saying please. I’m just saying, ‘I’ll walk down that road. I might walk down that road, I don’t know. I would never rule anything out because that journey is so unexpected.”
He adds, “I still think it’s a great frame for a show. Whether or not I’m in it, I don’t know, but it’s a good way to look at the world, and a good way to generate interesting stories.”
It was another of his major characters that brought him back to music. Playing Hank Moody in Californication, another fan favourite series that ran from 2007 to 2014, he convinced creator Tom Kapinos that his character should play the guitar. “I had the brilliant idea that Hank should learn how to play the guitar, and that David should get free guitar lessons.”
After playing covers, and then beginning to shape his own songs, friends put him together with a group of musicians. He released his debut record Hell or Highwater in 2015.
His music – with influences ranging from Warren Zevon to Tom Petty – is introspective and soulful, though not as he says “confessional or autobiographical… I care less about what I’m feeling and more about what other people feel.”
The creative has spoken out about Trump in the past and previously written political material – the song Laying on the Tracks in his most recent album referenced “a stupid orange man in a cheap red hat” – but he isn’t going down that road right now. “I feel it limits the songs in space and time. It’s hard to have a nuanced political argument through a song, right? That’s kind of the point, at this point. How can we speak to one another? It’s not really about name calling in a song.”
Referring to Laying on the Tracks he said at the time that “it felt urgent to try and make myself heard. I think we’ve been heard, we all know where we stand. The problem is trying to respect one another and trying to compromise, which doesn’t seem to be happening. If I had the words, trust me I’d share. If I had the answer… I would.”
We are talking a few days after the attempted assassination of former President Trump, but before the current incumbent Joe Biden has pulled out of running for re-election. I ask Duchovny about it.
“The incident this weekend comes down to the fact that America has a serious gun problem,” he says, with animation. “To me that is not partisan, but it seems to play out that way. But if you just look at the facts that a 20-year-old has access to that kind of weapon, it’s nuts.”
As we finish up, we talk about how he’s as busy as ever. A film he wrote and directed, Reverse the Curse, came out earlier in the year – based on his novel Bucky F**king Dent (he had to change the title because streaming services “don’t like curse words”) – he’s writing this new album and working on a screenplay and developing several new TV shows.
He laughs, “Yeah I’m pushing boulders up hills, making music and just keeping the plates spinning I guess.”
