Mission Creep

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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.”

Indeed, there’s a quiet sense of joy and release to much of the recordings. Laid down in his native North London, Damian Lewis feels uniquely at home; ‘Makin’ Plans’ has a mischievous quality, while something like ‘Soho Tango’ lives and breathes the illicit side of Central London after hours.In reference to the video, he adds “"We hoped to convey the feeling of an abandoned house, of the ghost of the woman that once lived there and a group of friends gathering to celebrate her” 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. I always said I’m not doing ‘major’ label stuff, but Decca were very persuasive, very seductive and very supportive

Here he takes us further inside his debut and how he came to join the likes of fellow Hollywood star Jeff Goldblum in landing a record deal with Decca… I wanted the album to give a sense of a journey to this point, from busking ‘’til now.” – Damian Lewis Speaking about ‘She Comes’ Lewis explains “'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 crescending with a jazz feel brought by my brilliant band”. 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. 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.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.” 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”. 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.