– His Second Wind Is Picking Up Speed –
by Sam Charles McNeon | Yorkshire Post | June 6, 2026
What must be in the Hollywood water right now, to have several of its finest thespians itching to prove their triple-threat credentials? Kiefer Sutherland played the O2 Academy Leeds last month; Jeff Goldblum was down the M62 entertaining patrons in Manchester just the other night. Peter Capaldi has fresh dates in the diary, and Keanu Reeves plays Download next week with Dogstar, though the John Wick gun-fu maestro represents something of an odd curio in the sense that he is not the de-facto star of the Californian post-grunge outfit.
Into the actor-muso complex returns Damian Lewis, touting sophomore effort Sweet Chaos and still as suavely personable as ever.
The Band of Brothers and Homeland favourite retrained his gaze upon the guitar during the Covid-19 pandemic, following a youthful stint as a continental busker, and subsequently poured his soul into debut record Mission Creep after the death of his wife, the actress Helen McCrory. He previously referred to this instrumental diversion as a “mini midlife crisis”: three years on, it appears more than mere hobbyist play for the Emmy winner.
This stripped-back show a few blocks away from benefactor Crash Records comes at the top of a short run to promote the new material, synergetically alighting in West Yorkshire as it lands on the shelves too.
It allows the star to effectively road-test material in more intimate surroundings, to wrestle with the expanded shapes and palates of his work; Question Mark may not move the needle too much from his prior soft-jazz melodies, but the touch of Orange Juice that underpins No Man’s Land suggests more barbed pop-chops beneath his marmalade hair and peaked cap.
Throughout, Lewis is engagingly chatty, if strictly on-rails; accompanied by onetime World Party player David Catlin-Birch on bass, there’s little time for extraneous asides in a half-hour set, bar one anecdote about live staple Pentonville Prison and a near-brush with disaster after a cycling accident.
But the further flashes of a matured sound here, even in relatively embryonic form, do give pause for further thought, such as King and its Mark Knopfler-ish inflections, or the steady flamenco vibes of the title track.
“Thanks for coming down,” Lewis says, before vanishing, only to return with a pint in hand and vinyl-sleeves to sign. His second wind is picking up speed.
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