Mission Creep

Product Information

I always said I’m not doing ‘major’ label stuff, but Decca were very persuasive, very seductive and very supportive

I wrote the songs on the steel-string and a bit on the piano and took them into the guys. [The songs] are complete enough that they could be busked, but they’re better with a band. We recorded on tape, and I said to Giacomo who produced it and introduced me to a lot of music, ‘Let’s not do this big, over-produced digitised thing – let’s do something that feels like we’re all in a bar playing together’. Because that makes me feel more legit and authentic, because that’s the way I’ve always played – getting out a guitar on the street and playing in a market square by a fountain, outside the Pompidou. In that regard, it should have that feeling.” 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. 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. 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.”Later on, was he on a war footing to make sure the end of her life was as good as possible? “Yes, yes, yes – until the moment of death you’re fully engaged in living the best possible life that can be lived for the person dying, and for you as a family and for the children. And it takes an enormous amount of energy. So the collapse in death, the exhaustion, comes with that.”

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. 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. I tell him how much I like A Spy Among Friends. We talk about how the top British private schools proved such a fertile recruiting ground for not only spies but double agents – of the Cambridge spy ring, Philby went to Westminster, Anthony Blunt to Marlborough, Donald Maclean to Gresham’s and Guy Burgess to Eton. Was Lewis ever approached to be a spook? “No,” he says. Were any of his contemporaries at Eton spies? “Rory Stewart?” Has Stewart ever admitted to it? “No, I’m only guessing.” (Stewart has always denied being a spy, but says that if he had been, he would not be able to confirm it.)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.

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.” 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 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.” 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. Co-presidents of Decca Label Group, Tom Lewis and Laura Monks, said: “We are so delighted that Damian chose Decca.The lyrics call for his lover to climb him “like a vine”, and hears him sing: “Start me laughing, stop me crying.” Damian and his brilliant band played gig number eight of their UK Tour in Gateshead at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music (formally Sage 2) on Saturday, October 7, 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. 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.” 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”.