Mission Creep

Product Information

Lewis previously performed at Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire last year as well as gigs at London venues including Omeara, Koko, Tabernacle and Hoxton Hall. When Lewis was young, he did a lot of busking. I ask if he could have made a career of it. And now the man who was talking fluent football a moment ago is mumbling diffidently. “Erm … well … do you know what I’ve done recently?” I’ve heard he’s making an album of songs inspired by McCrory. “Well, yeah, it’s simplistic to put it like that, but I, erm, I am being a musician. Now. As well as being an actor,” he says, like a stage-shy X Factor contestant. “So I suppose, to answer your question, I could have been a musician. And I’ve ended up trying to be one. I’ve no idea whether I’ll be a good musician.” She Comes is the first song I wrote for my debut album, so that makes it… my first song (That I’ve shared with the world, at any rate….). It’s about ghosts, and one ghost in particular. The album has hybrid sounds all through it, but this song leans heavily on a folk set up before crescendoing with a jazz feel brought by my brilliant band.” 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.

Co-presidents of Decca Label Group, Tom Lewis and Laura Monks, said: “We are so delighted that Damian chose Decca. Damian Lewis says, “I wanted the album to give a sense of a journey to this point, from busking ‘til now.” 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. 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.”That might sound like a ­modest claim for a man whose father was an insurance broker at Lloyd’s of London and whose maternal ancestors include a Lord Mayor and a royal doctor. Lewis grew up in St John’s Wood, north ­London, before being sent to boarding school in East Sussex from the age of eight, then on to Eton, where he learned classical guitar and formed his first, short-lived band, the No Names. He recalls playing a cover of Just What I Needed by the Cars at a school assembly in front of 250 fellow pupils, accompanied for the entire performance by the loud, derisive laughter of a close friend. “It crushed me,” he says, as if he can still feel the embarrassment, ­decades later. 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. I wanted the album to give a sense of a journey to this point, from busking ‘til now,” Lewis added.

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.” Lewis’s album may have been created partly as a balm to a troubled soul, but the songs only sound sad if you view them through his personal history. He says he prefers to leave the lyrics to each song “a ­little bit opaque” to “allow listeners to borrow from it in ways that relate to their own life and experience”.

About this event

I always said I’m not doing ‘major’ label stuff, but Decca were very persuasive, very seductive and very supportive His biggest headline show to date will be at Union Chapel in London on July 11, with more live dates expected to be announced soon, after he spoke about having conversations with Glastonbury festival. Decca Records is thrilled to release the debut album from Damian Lewis, out today. Entitled ‘Mission Creep’, the album features debut single ‘ Down On The Bowery’, bluesy ‘ Zaragoza ’ and new single ‘ She Comes’ , all out now. 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.