Ben Stiller erupts in laughter. No, he says, down the phone from New York, he really didn’t expect to be giving an interview on this subject in 2018. It wasn’t that he forgot about the album he made with a band called Capital Punishment while at high school in 1981. He had a box of unsold vinyl copies in his house, and he would occasionally fish one out and play it to his kids. “They would really get a kick out of it; they thought it was pretty funny.” He mentioned it during an interview on the Tonight Show a few years back and the host, Jimmy Fallon, played a track, much to the hilarity of the studio audience.

It’s just that he assumed absolutely no one could possibly be interested now. The band had pressed 500 copies back in 1981 and played it to their friends and the parents, who had stumped up the money in the first place. The response, says Stiller’s erstwhile bandmate Kriss Roebling, was one of “polite befuddlement” – and that was that. Roebling had gone around local record stores with a box of albums and sold a few on consignment here and there, but the only evidence that anyone had bought one came after a member of the band was, improbable as it seems, nearly hit by a copy of the album as it was tossed from the window of a nearby building. “That,” says Roebling, “was the general reaction. It was a non-event at the time.”

It might well have stayed that way had Mike Sniper, owner of the label Captured Tracks, not taken on the challenge of clearing out the New York apartment belonging to a recently deceased compulsive hoarder. Among his belongings, Sniper found a copy of Capital Punishment’s Roadkill but had no idea that the B Stiller credited with playing drums was the star of Zoolander and A Night at the Museum. He was enthralled enough by its sound, though, to try to track down the band so he could reissue it.

Ben Stiller on drums. Photograph: Capital Punishment

You can see why: plenty of famous actors dabbled in music before, or indeed after, making it in Hollywood, but it’s hard to think of anyone who was involved in an album as odd as Roadkill. Some of it is very much in the vein of Throbbing Gristle or the post-industrial artists they spawned: eerie soundscapes overlaid with feedback and recordings of news reports about serial killers and Heinrich Himmler singing the Horst Wessel Song. There are guitar-based tracks that recall the shambolic indie of Television Personalities or Swell Maps. A deeply odd sense of humour, reminiscent of the Residents, runs through the whole thing. There are songs sung in weird accents and a news report about the Hillside Strangler followed by a burst of bagpipe music.

“We were 15, 16, 17 years old,” Stiller says. “It’s a totally different way of looking at the world. We were doing the things you do as a teenager that you think are funny. Half the time they aren’t – they’re just funny to you – but you have that brash sense of: ‘Let’s do this. This would be really cool.’ You’re not editing it because it’s just where you are in your life. The album is what it is because of that.”

In fact, he says, his musical tastes at the time were more mainstream than the stuff he was making. He was “a guy who was into the Cars”; the most avant garde he got was listening to David Bowie’s Scary Monsters. The album sounds the way it does partly because of Roebling’s love of experimental music and partly because it was a musical extension of its four members’ love of what Stiller calls “little adventures”. Stiller, Roebling, Peter Swann and Peter Zusi were “total weirdos”, given to amusing themselves by “going out on the street and faking each other’s murders, complete with daggers, retractable blades, fake blood and all this sort of stuff”, says Stiller. “Another time, we ran down the street with very realistic prop firearms, screaming: ‘Everybody out of the way!’ We staged a couple of public floggings as well, as I recall. Of course, New Yorkers at the time didn’t even look at us.”

‘It’s not real’ … Stiller (far left) ‘eating’ a rat and Roebling (far right) with his severed hand.

“We weren’t that into drugs and maybe that was our alternative,” says Roebling. “It was kind of weirdly innocent, as opposed to guys downtown who were getting into real-life trouble.”

You can get a flavour of their behaviour from the photos that accompany the reissue. In one, everyday-looking high-school friends grin for the camera, except for Roebling, who is holding a knife stabbed through what appears to be a severed human hand, and Stiller, who is eating a rat. “It’s not a real rat,” he says, laughing. “We’ll stop that rumour right there. I think you see a couple of teenagers crying out for attention, saying: ‘Hey, look at me!’”

The recording sessions for the album itself apparently passed in a blur of excitement from the members of Capital Punishment and utter bafflement from the professional studio engineers they paid to work with them. The band fiddled with tape loops, inhaled helium and insisted that mistake-laden takes were keepers. When it was finished, none of them really seems to have known what to do to promote it. They played a single gig, but, says Stiller, “I don’t know how successful that was.” Instead of the album, they performed a lengthy easy-listening instrumental under the name Rent-a-Gong. Their other big idea involved ringing up public access TV shows and late night radio talkshows and screaming: “Capital Punishment is a rock band!” before hanging up. “I don’t think we really knew what dealing with the music industry entailed,” says Stiller.

Roadkill’s Capital Punishment Spotify

The band broke up when its members went to college, and Stiller says he never really had any further musical ambitions. The closest he got was while employed as a PA for a film-maker working on a documentary about Foreigner. “I was at a studio, helping with equipment while Lou Gramm was recording the lead vocal for I Want to Know What Love Is. He went to the bathroom, and I got in front of the microphone and started pretending to sing. He walked back in and said: ‘Hey man, you look pretty good there.’ I had a brief moment where I thought: ‘This would be really cool to do.’”

He says he was “sceptical” when he heard about Sniper’s plan to rerelease the album. In fact, it had developed a minor cult following among collectors (an original copy will set you back $200 on Discogs), but was bowled over by his enthusiasm: Sniper told Roebling that his own band, Blank Dogs, had recorded music inspired by the tracks on Roadkill.

In fact, Sniper’s passion proved so infectious that Capital Punishment have re-formed, a not-unimpressive feat given the members’ current careers: aside from Stiller’s work as an actor, writer, director and producer, Roebling is a noted documentarian and writer, while bassist Peter Swann is a judge in Arizona and guitarist Peter Zusi is a professor of Czech and Slovak literature at University College London. Perhaps understandably, Stiller says, the first time they got back together in a rehearsal studio was “just weird”, but there’s a new EP coming out on Record Store Day Black Friday called This is Capital Punishment. They are talking about playing live, if their schedules allow it. The other night, Stiller says, he finally met Sniper, who was at pains to point out that he wasn’t interested in his celebrity. “He was like: ‘My goal is to have people introduce you as the drummer in Capital Punishment.’”

• This is Capital Punishment is released by Captured Tracks on 23 November.