– Touring Britain’s Clubs In A Van –
by Will Hodgkinson | The Times | August 14, 2026
When one of the great actors of his generation, who made his name bringing Tudor paranoia to Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and inner conflict to the American marine turned al-Qaeda operative Nicholas Brody in Homeland, releases an album, the first question you are drawn to ask is: why?
“If it’s not too bold a claim,” Damian Lewis says, “I would like to release some beauty into the world. It’s an 18th-century idea: making a piece of work that might just illuminate and transcend, and I feel I have something to say. It’s not easy, but a play, a novel or a song can achieve that.”
Lewis is a man with a certain solidity about him. Over lunch at Shoreditch House in east London, during a winding conversation that takes in early adventures in music, the roles that have defined him, the death of his actress wife, Helen McCrory, and the forces that drew him to make albums in his fifties, he emanates an old-fashioned strain of Englishness: well mannered and rather stoic, but with a sensitivity that lies hidden under that carapace of propriety.
After all, old Etonians don’t typically let it all out on songs about love, lust, motorbike crashes and, as Louis MacNeice put it in his poem Snow, the drunkenness of things being various. They all feature on Sweet Chaos, his follow-up to 2023’s Mission Creep, on which he made his album debut at 52. As it turns out, making music is an itch that Lewis has been trying to scratch for a long time.
“I was learning classical guitar when I was 12, 13 and I wanted to sing and play,” Lewis says of his new, or perhaps old, second career at 55. “And I was busking. At 18, 19, 20, 21 I hopped on a motorbike, took a tent and went round Europe in the summer. I could run from Bowie to the Beatles, from Elvis to Bob Marley … A smorgasbord of well-known songs.”
Like so many of us with a reasonable amount of comfort to fall back on have done at some point or another, Lewis was living the bohemian dream: singing for his supper, travelling on his own, making enough money to go from town to town while staying in campsites along the way. “In Avignon, during the theatre festival, I would set up on the river and everyone coming back late at night, drunk or whatever, would sit down and listen. I would be playing to about 100 people and it was fantastic.”
In other words, before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1997 and setting off on his life’s path, Lewis was a roving troubadour. “I was listening to loads of Fifties rockabilly — Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley — and that’s what I was trying to get out of a voice and an acoustic guitar. You listen to Elvis’s Mystery Train and it’s unbelievably rhythmic. It was my first love, and the first album came from that place.”
From Busker to Drama School
It would be easy to dismiss Lewis’s musical turn as an indulgence, a midlife crisis or, perhaps, as I suggest to him, a form of therapy after the death of McCrory in 2021. He says it was more a case of taking up acting as the (slightly) less risky career option. When he was growing up in St John’s Wood in north London, the son of an insurance broker father and a mother who served on the board of the Royal Court, the theatre had a more respectable tinge to it than dreams of rock, or at least singer-songwriter, glory.
“At school I always acted, always sang, always played an instrument. I think because of the culture in which I grew up, of private schools and my parents being theatregoers, it seemed like the right option,” he says. “I don’t think there was a fork in the road; it wasn’t that dramatic. From the age of 16 I felt I wanted to be an actor. My parents were very cool about it and I went to drama school instead of uni. It was the thing that was most knowable, and while I loved doing music, I had no real contact with it beyond being in school bands and busking. It was a passion that would sit alongside the thing I’d make money doing.”
Nor was Eton the hotbed of theatrical talent it is sometimes portrayed as, with former pupils Eddie Redmayne, 44, Tom Hiddleston, 45, Dominic West, 56, and Hugh Laurie, 67, spread across the school’s alumni over two decades. “Out of 250 people leaving school that year, there were only two people who wanted to do anything in the arts,” Lewis points out. “The other guy is called Gresby Nash and he also went to drama school, acted for a bit and became a musician and composer. Back then, stating that you wanted to be an actor felt like the Wild West — not an act of defiance as such, but there just wasn’t anyone else doing it.”
Coming from the establishment does mean Lewis can get under the skin of patrician figures. He plays Bernard “Monty” Montgomery in the forthcoming Pressure, a Second World War drama about the build-up to the D-Day landings, with Andrew Scott’s meteorologist arguing against Montgomery and General Eisenhower’s plans because of an impending storm. It’s a film about Britain’s finest hour in the war against Nazi Germany, but it’s also about the weather. It doesn’t get more English than that.
“There’s no getting away from it: Pressure is a film about weather forecasts,” Lewis accepts. “I had schoolboy knowledge of Monty, our great hero, besting Rommel, the Desert Fox, at Alamein. Then I did some reading around him and he was a complicated character: a man of a certain era and a certain class, repressed, maybe sexually, certainly emotionally. And he had a slightly complicated relationship with young men, whom he kept as pen pals. He married the first woman he had sex with, and then she died and he was never with another woman again.”
When I suggest that Lewis’s own need to express himself in song may have come from the repression brought by boarding school, given he was sent to Ashdown House in East Sussex at the age of eight, he rejects the idea as armchair psychology. But he does know that world and it shows in his acting. Lewis was never better than in his portrayal of Henry VIII as a godlike figure in Wolf Hall, beset with a complex mix of unquestionable authority and psychic torment — a bit like so many survivors of the public-school system, in fact.
“Stanislavski, in his book on acting, wrote about emotional memory: you borrow from your own life and attach it to whatever it is you’re playing,” Lewis confirms, when I ask if he draws on his own experience to inform his roles. “I don’t do that consciously but there’s no question it happens subconsciously, and acting is the imaginary journey you take to meet the character in the world he’s in. Henry becomes increasingly paranoid. He’s frustrated with his health and he feels the weight of being a monarch, which he believes is his divine right. But one of Henry’s strengths was that he liked men of the world, like Wolsey and Cromwell. He promoted them. He elevated them. And then he killed them.”
I put it to Lewis that he may share something of Henry VIII’s approach. “Executions?” he inquires casually, catching my eye over a forkful of new potatoes. “Assassinations?”
Breaking Into Music
I was thinking more of shaking off the shackles of fame and getting out on the road in a rock’n’roll band, just as Henry enjoyed the company of the sons of butchers and blacksmiths. “I was always putting together bands at the end of shoots, playing at the wrap party, and it’s amazing how many musicians are now working in props or the sound department,” he says by way of answer. “They pull out a bass, say, ‘Yeah, I nearly had a record deal when I was 24,’ and turn out to be incredibly talented. But you know how hard it is for musicians to make it.”
Lewis’s own break, musically speaking, came after he sang a handful of jazz standards on a Radio 2 show and a man in the audience called Steve Abbott, who is now his manager, suggested recording some material. “By then I was used to being an actor so it was quite left-field, but I thought: life is short. Why not? Now I’ve spent the past five years of my life making two albums and loving it.”
Does he suffer from impostor syndrome? “I make most of my decisions out of instinct and it felt natural, so the answer is no. But to other people, looking in, the decisions you make might seem either courageous or foolish. I never feel that way. I had things I wanted to say and, although it was in a different medium, the central proposition is the same: telling stories to get to the nub of the thing that makes us all tick. There is a lot of cross-pollination.”
When Lewis released the jazzy, languid, rather sad Mission Creep in 2023 it was just two years after the death of McCrory, mother to his children, Manon and Gulliver, now 19 and 18, when she was 52. “I started [writing songs on the album] before Helen died,” he says, at the suggestion that her death prompted the need to make sense of it in song. “But if you accept that an album is like a journal, even if you’re Bruce Springsteen and you’re writing about New Jersey, it’s going to be infused with where you are at the time. So yes, there are songs that are unquestionably about Helen, or loss, but it’s not an act of therapy.”
What was McCrory like? “She was a great actress with an artist’s soul and way of thinking, and she was curious. And she loved Bob Dylan more than anyone.” Was she encouraging of his new direction? “She was, but in all honesty she was ill by then and we were dealing with bigger things. There wasn’t a lot of chat about it.”
During the recording of that first album, there were times when Lewis thought he was hitting something euphoric and energised. It’s only when he listened back to songs like Wanna Grow Old in Paris and She Comes, which are clearly about McCrory, that he saw how much his grief had affected the tone. “It must have been because of my state of mind, because I was fragile,” he says. “Now I realise what a tender record it is. It’s the same as making a movie: your own moods and personality infuse it, so it ends up as something you didn’t necessarily intend. Occasionally I play back my first album and think, ‘I really like that. I wonder who did it?’ ”
This time round, Lewis has gone towards rock and folk with a bit of big-voiced balladry thrown in. The title track to Sweet Chaos, a portrait of a “charming man, never vulgar or rude”, has shades of Scott Walker’s overarching drama. “I think it’s about relinquishing control in the chaos of life,” Lewis says of the song. “In grief, in chaos, all you can be is in the moment. You cannot control it and it is oddly freeing. On top of that, our minds have been scattered by the modern world and if you’re someone who is prone to anxiety about forgetting the thing you’re meant to do at the end of the week, it can be difficult. As my mum said: make lists.”
‘I don’t like dishonesty’
It’s not all big themes. Pentonville Prison is about a motorbike crash Lewis had on the London street of the title. Grey at the Temples is a sweet, folky tune about having a bad memory. And there is a jaunty song with the less than delightful title of Leech, the subject of which has made me rather nervous. “So we talk about the weather and you compliment my sweater and you ask me where I got my boots from,” it goes. “You say they look designer, must have cost more than a fiver, and I wonder where this question comes from.” A lot of actors are wary of journalists. Only a few of them immortalise a journalist’s duplicity in song.
“I don’t like dishonesty,” Lewis says of the experience, which sounds like a familiar scenario: lots of compliments during the interview and an unfavourable profile afterwards, or at least one that Lewis read as unfavourable. “This person behaved badly, so there’s a song. That’s all you need to know.”
Having a public profile clearly provides material to write about. Many years ago Lewis had a stalker, who showed up to first nights before ending up writing letters with increasingly violent threats. “In the end, the studio I was working with in Los Angeles put out an injunction and she left me alone,” Lewis says, when I ask if a song called No Man’s Land, with its words about love smelling like blood, is about the incident. “Actually it’s not about her, but it is my most paranoid song: love as an act of aggression. Love should always be wonderful, but there are periods in life when it is not. People reading this might think, ‘What a weirdo,’ but love can feel oddly hostile. It’s to do with one’s state of mind.”
These days Lewis has a new girlfriend, Alison Mosshart, the Florida-born singer of the scuzzy rock duo the Kills. When I ask if she has been an influence, he says he would rather not talk about her beyond confirming that she’s been supportive of his new direction. What he will say is that he has signed up for the privations of the touring life, with its motorway service station meals and pitiful fees, at least as much as acting commitments allow. He’s off again in October, doing it, he says, for the love of the music.
The Van Life
“We get in the back of a van and go charging across the country,” he says. “Typically I’m playing before 250-400 people, and I really enjoy it because you’re not Henry V, you’re not Henry VIII: you’re just you. And it has to wash its own face. That’s what you step into, slightly unwittingly. I just wanted to write some songs and now, with everyone in the band getting paid, I’m running a business. I’m not touring like Oasis. It’s playing the clubs and travelling in a splitter van. We’re playing at the Garage [in London, October 14.] You can come, Will. Abandon your big revival concerts. Slum it with the real people.”
I can indeed, although one of the real people I’ll be slumming it with is Damian Lewis, star of Band of Brothers, Homeland, Billions and many, many more. He has to admit, he does have a leg up over the average singer-songwriting hopeful.
“Well, that might be good once,” he concludes. “But in the long run it’s unhelpful.” Because you’ve got to prove more? “I think so.” And with that, Damian Lewis picks up the bill for the both of us.
Sweet Chaos is out now.
Damian is on tour from October.
Pressure is in cinemas from September 9, 2026.
Read the rest of the original article at The Times