Mission Creep

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Smith also introduced him to some musicians from his jazz outfit Kansas Smitty, and together they formed a group who have been performing gigs. With Helen McCrory in 2020: ‘Helen was ill for four years. You’re in a state of semi-grief while the person is still alive.’ Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images Co-presidents of Decca Label Group, Tom Lewis and Laura Monks, said: “We are so delighted that Damian chose Decca. In 2017, he told the Guardian: “The cut and thrust of a successful school can be very bonding. I was always encouraged to be on teams at sport; I got a lot from that. Would I send my son to Eton? I might.” In the event, he didn’t. “It wasn’t the right thing for my son,” he says now. “We just decided what was best for him.”

This is hardly a problem confined to the arts, he says. “It’s true of any self-employed business. How long can you keep it going before you need to make money? Obviously if there’s independent wealth attached to young artists or their families, then they can be supported through the bleak first five or six years, and then they could meet with great success in years seven and eight. A pattern might emerge where people who don’t have that independent money have given up by years seven and eight, so we’ll never know whether they would have been successful or not.” Damian and his brilliant band played gig number seven of their UK Tour to a sold out crowd in Leeds at Brudenell Social Club on Sunday, October 1, 2023 in support of his debut album Mission Creep. Damian opened the show with his first single Down on the Bowery, followed by Zaragoza, Hole in My Roof, My Little One, Soho Tango and nine more songs, not including encore songs! He also played his new songs Pentonville Prison and Traffic Jam. For encore he played a cover of After Midnight and his other new song She Makin’ Me Change. Lewis previously performed at Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire last year as well as gigs at London venues including Omeara, Koko, Tabernacle and Hoxton Hall. The journey to this point began a long time ago. A fan of everyone from John Martyn and The Rolling Stones to Velvet Underground and Eddie Cochran, Lewis tried to write songs in his early twenties before his nerves got the better of him. “I didn’t feel comfortable doing it,” he tells Music Week. “I didn’t know how to do it, I wasn’t confident.” Today, Lewis tells me that he felt wiped out after her death as everything caught up with him. “For four or five months, you’re physically drained. Helen was ill for four and a half years. They say that the first day of diagnosis of an illness that could be terminal is your first day of grief. You are in a state of semi-grief while the person is still alive because there is always the sense that something might go wrong at any point. There’s a hyper-alertness and you are incredibly present and charged at all times. You’re on a sort of war footing. You’ve got something to deal with that gives you great focus. Everything is going into getting that person better.”

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The way he discusses death and grief is admirably honest. Has he written about this in any of the songs? “No. People will, you know … they’ll find in the songs what they want to find in them.”

Damian and his brilliant band played gig number ten of their UK Tour to a sold out show in Wavendon, Milton Keynes at The Stables in the Jim Marshall Auditorium on Monday, November 6, 2023 in support of his debut album Mission Creep. The Stables venue was founded by jazz royalty Sir John Dankworth and Dame Cleo Laine, which Damian thought was a brilliant legacy to have for the show. Fans were keen to share that they spotted Damian’s partner Alison Mosshart in the audience, front row. I always said I’m not doing ‘major’ label stuff, but Decca were very persuasive, very seductive and very supportive Commenting on Damian’s music and his debut album, Co-Presidents of Decca Label Group, Tom Lewis and Laura Monks, say “We are so delighted that Damian chose Decca. His songwriting is poetic, poignant and deeply personal. The album, recorded just down the road in Kentish Town, has a raw and refreshing honesty to it. Damian really opens his heart and invites us in. It is a thing of great beauty.” Damian and his brilliant band played gig number six of their UK Tour in Manchester at Band on the Wall on Saturday, September 30, 2023 in support of his debut album Mission Creep. Damian opened the show with his first single Down on the Bowery, followed by Zaragoza, Hole in My Roof, My Little One, Soho Tango and nine more songs, not including encore songs! He also played his new songs Pentonville Prison and Traffic Jam. For encore he played a cover of After Midnight and his other new song She Makin’ Me Change. Damian told the audience that the Manchester gig was the best he’s played and since we were boots on the ground, we agree! The energy in the room was amazing! Has the album got a title yet? “Yes. Mission Creep.” I tell him I’m never sure what “mission creep” means. “Mission creep is when you go to war and you invade one country, and before you know it you’ve invaded another. You allow your mission to spread and go where you shouldn’t.” Why that title? Another smile. “Are you a mission creep?” he asks himself. “Or is it a mission creep? Or ‘That mission creep.’” So is there a hint of self-loathing in the title? “No, not particularly. Not particularly.”Damian and his brilliant band played gig number nine of their UK Tour in Basingstoke at The Haymarket on Wednesday, November 1, 2023 in support of his debut album Mission Creep. We can’t be sure of the set list, but if it’s anything like the other shows on this UK Tour then Damian opened the show with his first single Down on the Bowery, followed by Zaragoza, Hole in My Roof, My Little One, Soho Tango and nine more songs, not including encore songs. He usually plays his new songs Pentonville Prison and Traffic Jam. For encore he usually plays a cover of After Midnight and his other new song She Makin’ Me Change. This is just what the world needs," says Damian Lewis with a broad grin. "Another record from an actor." It's a very typical remark for Lewis: with a charming mixture of self-irony and self-knowledge, he takes the wind out of the sails of potential critics and notorious complainers right away. The 52-year-old Briton is only known to the public as a decorated film, television and theatre actor (CBE), especially through internationally successful series such as "Band Of Brothers", "Homeland" and "Billions". Music has always been Damian's first passion and has never let him go, despite his extremely successful acting career. His colleagues know this only too well. As a guitarist and singer, he has been part of an occasional band for many years, which entertains the entire film crew at parties after filming. You may know him as the star of TV shows like Band Of Brothers, Homeland and Billions, plus films like Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, but Damian Lewis is adding another string to his bow in 2023. This week, he releases his debut album, Mission Creep, via Decca Records. He contrasts the experience of performing his own songs to playing a role on stage or screen. “As an actor, you are constantly asked to draw on your emotional self, and that can feel very exposing. But it’s not you, it’s the writer of that piece who is actually speaking directly from themselves. You are an interpreter. With this, there’s no ­characterisation, it is just you. I’ve found myself thinking ‘Is it more enjoyable to inhabit a character in a parallel reality? Or is it more fun standing on stage as me?’ They are very different things. And I don’t have the answer yet.” Lewis has been performing music his whole life, from choirs, to bands, to strumming for money on the streets. “If I can claim to be anything,” he says, “it’s a busker.”

It’s the first song I wrote,” Lewis tells me. “It is a complicated love letter, about ghosts. I probably wrote it out when I was at my most raw.” Damian Lewisunveils his passionate new single ‘She Comes’, taken from his upcoming debut album ‘Mission Creep’ due for release on June 16th via Decca. The single is accompanied by a music video. I ask if he would like a drink. “I want to drink more coffee.” Does he fancy an alcoholic drink? “No, I can’t drink alcohol today. My daughter is 16 today. Sweet 16. We’ve got a little surprise dinner for her tonight.” How have the kids been? “Amazing. They’re incredible. That’s all I’m going to say about them.” He says he thinks he has said enough about Helen and the family. I said to everyone involved, ‘I am doing this for me, for fun, so let’s try and have some.’ ” Lewis self-financed the recording, but subsequently signed to major label Decca, a division of Universal Music. “It got big on me,” he jokes. Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory were one of Britain’s most feted acting couples. He made his name playing Major Richard Winters in the US second world war TV series Band of Brothers, created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Perhaps he is best known as the former US marine and prisoner of war Nicholas Brody in the espionage thriller Homeland. Lewis seems to have two identities as an actor – in American dramas, he often plays macho military types. In British dramas, he tends to be cast in privileged establishment roles, of which the most obviously privileged is Henry VIII in the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Lewis is fabulous as the terrifying yet needy man-baby monarch. As for McCrory, she was simply one of the greatest actors of her generation on stage (The Seagull, Medea, The Deep Blue Sea) and screen (The Queen, Peaky Blinders, Harry Potter). They had been married nearly 14 years when she died in April 2021, aged 52.Cary says that the more they explored the story of Philby and Elliott, the more personal it became to them. “It’s about our people, posh white men, and how they’ve endangered the country. And that’s what makes it timely. How their friendships, their clubbiness, have endangered the country. ” Like Philby, Cary went to Westminster. “The two characters cared more about themselves and their club and way of life than the country itself.” He will follow this up with his first studio album, Mission Creep - a war reference - which is due out on June 16, amid a number of live performances scheduled for the summer. He has said he hopes to perform at Glastonbury in June. His love of music started when he left school, after studying at Eton, and went busking through Europe, where he says he could earn up to “20 to 30 quid an hour”. But he admits he is wary of overselling himself. “There’s nothing more annoying than an actor who thinks he’s Bruce Springsteen. By the way, I don’t think I’m Bruce Springsteen. This is a mini midlife crisis, but it’s not a full-blown midlife crisis.” If anybody is entitled to a bit of a midlife crisis, surely it’s Lewis. Lewis grew up in St John’s Wood, a well-to-do area of London. His father was an insurance broker with Lloyd’s. His maternal grandfather was lord mayor of London, and down the generations on his mother’s side there is an impressive lineage of aristocrats, philanthropists, shipbuilders and a doctor to the royal family. Lewis was sent to boarding school aged eight, and went on to Eton, the country’s most famous private school. There, he studied drama and learned to play classical guitar. By the age of 16, he had decided he wanted to become an actor and went on to graduate from the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory were one of Britain’s most feted acting couples. He made his name playing Major Richard Winters in the US second world war TV series Band of Brothers, created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Perhaps he is best known as the former US marine and prisoner of war Nicholas Brody in the espionage thriller Homeland. Lewis seems to have two identities as an actor – in American dramas, he often plays macho military types. In British dramas, he tends to be cast in privileged establishment roles, of which the most obviously privileged is Henry VIII in the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Lewis is fabulous as the terrifying yet needy man-baby monarch. As for McCrory, she was simply one of the greatest actors of her generation on stage ( The Seagull, Medea, The Deep Blue Sea) and screen ( The Queen, Peaky Blinders, Harry Potter). They had been married nearly 14 years when she died in April 2021, aged 52.

After Helen’s death, Damian wrote a touching tribute to her, where he recalled how she had told the couple’s 16-year-old daughter Manon, and 15-year-old Gulliver son that she had given him her blessing to find love again. As his acting schedule freed up due to the pandemic, he began playing and writing songs and later teamed up with various musicians including Italian-American Giacomo Smith.