Mission Creep

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In addition to sharing “She Comes,” Lewis has also announced a further selection of UK dates in Gateshead, Birmingham, Nottingham, Cardiff, Bristol, Brighton, Manchester and Leeds. 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.” 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.

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”.Lewis linked up with one of today’s most exciting jazz musicians, Giacomo Smith, who in turn introduced Lewis to a collection of brilliant musicians, many of whom had played with Smith in the hugely loved and admired Kansas Smitty’s House Band. Lewis formed his band and early shows at London’s Omeara and KOKO gave him a first sense of what leading a band in front of a live audience could feel like. “It helps that the players are all insanely accomplished,” Lewis said. If this side of your life were to be a success. How will you accommodate it with the various other facets of your career? The same can’t be said for his debut. Mission Creep sees him join forces with American jazz guru Giacomo Smith and musicians from Kansas Smitty’s House Band, and proves to be a highly compelling, eclectic endeavour. It is, in his own words, “a sort of bluesy, jazzy, in-the-room, live sounding record”– indeed a lot of his vocals were recorded live playing with the band. Co-presidents of Decca Label Group, Tom Lewis and Laura Monks, said: “We are so delighted that Damian chose Decca. 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”.

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.”The Independent and Independent TV today announce the ninth series of Music Box. Hosted by music editor Roisin O’Connor, Music Box brings the latest up and comers – along with some of music’s biggest names – into the Music Box studio to play exclusive stripped-down sets.

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.” 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.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. Musicians becoming actors seems to be a lot more acceptable than actors becoming musicians. Do you have a take on why that is?