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. 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. 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.” Reflecting on writing the album, Lewis said: “I suddenly had a lot to say. People will judge if it’s any good or not, but for me, it felt entirely natural.”

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.”

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. 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.

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.” The new season will launch on Monday 6 November, with a new artist session airing each week until January 2024. Damian’s session will air in December. It was filmed at The Independent’s in-house Independent TV studio in Finsbury Square, London. Damian recently sat down with the Independent’s editor-in-chief Geordie Greig on the set of filming his session on Music Box, and you can watch that video interview here. View photostills in our Gallery here.

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.” 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. Had he discussed his ambition to be a musician with McCrory? “Yes, she knew I was talking to Steve and meeting with Giacomo.” Did he tell her he was really going to go for it? “At that point, it hadn’t formulated that much in my mind.” I ask whether the change in direction is to do with McCrory’s death? “Not consciously, but it’s inevitable there’s change. When you’ve been married to someone and they die prematurely, you’re left careering in a different direction. And that throws up … ” He speaks slowly, stops and starts again, making sure he gets his words right. “It’s a very fertile, very creative, raw, open time, as well as being flattening and difficult and sad. It’s all those things at once. Anybody who hasn’t been through it won’t fully understand, but I think anybody who has been through it will.”

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.

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If this side of your life were to be a success. How will you accommodate it with the various other facets of your career? 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! 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.

The first single "Down On The Bowery" provides a first taste of the album, which is to be released on 16 June by Decca. The catchy number sounds a bit as if Damian had borrowed it from the songbook of Bruce Springsteen or perhaps REM. But in fact, just like the rest of the songs on "Mission Creep", it came from his own pen. No question, the man has great talent not only as an actor. I’m thinking about what he said about death being a fertile period. Can he expand on that? “Well, death is oddly ecstatic. Along with birth, it’s the ultimate act of life, and it brings this enormous energy to it. And you carry that energy around with you. However deep and profound your sadness, a new beginning always has an energy to it. And it is a new beginning when your wife dies and you’re left on your own. Life has changed. So there is an energy in that.” 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. 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.) The actor-turned-musician pathway is well worn by this point. Numerous stars of stage and Silver Screen have swapped their scripts for microphone stands, and it can sometimes feel like a diversion – a sort of adult gap year, in other words. Damian Lewis, however, is a little different; music was his first love, and in his youth he travelled across Europe, busking as he went. A perennial source of comfort and inspiration, in a way it’s a wonder the actor hasn’t recorded a full length project before.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.”