– The DNA of Sweet Chaos –
by Karen Shaw | Northern Life Magazine | September 11, 2026
Emmy and Golden Globe winning actor Damian Lewis brings Sweet Chaos up north, talks Bowie and busking, claims Compo as his own, packs a ping-pong bat — then ruins it all with ketchup and a frankly indefensible view of gravy.
It’s not every day you discover that you and Damian Lewis have more in common than a mutual appreciation of a decent tune. We’re both redheads, born just weeks apart in 1971, and, as it turns out, we were both packed into Brixton Academy on 11 May 1991 watching Lenny Kravitz do his thing.
Thirty-five years later, one of us is interviewing the other. I’ll leave you to work out which one went on to win an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
There’s sunshine at his end of the phone. Naturally, he’s already got his shorts on, while up north it’s absolutely chucking it down.
“You’re coming up north soon,” I warn him. “You’d better get wrapped up.”
Fortunately, Yorkshire holds no terrors for Lewis. He has family in York, has cycled through the Dales and talks warmly about the place and, more importantly, its people. This autumn he’ll be back, bringing his band and second album, Sweet Chaos, to Holmfirth Picturedrome on Sunday, 25 October, as part of his UK tour
I remind him that Yorkshire audiences are friendly — but we do like value for money.
“I play for three hours,” he says.
Three hours? Guitar or ping-pong?
“Yeah, I break off in the middle and challenge people to ping-pong mid-gig,” he jokes.
As it happens, ping-pong is no random diversion. Lewis has loved table tennis since childhood and was a school champion. And the habit travelled with him. While filming Billions in New York, he would head to a scrappy, basement-style ping-pong club in Williamsburg during downtime for a few games.
And it provides a rather neat route into the day job.
Lewis became internationally known as Major Richard Winters in Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ Band of Brothers, earning a Golden Globe nomination. Then came Nicholas Brody in Homeland, the role that brought him both a Primetime Emmy and a Golden Globe, followed by hedge-fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod in Billions and Henry VIII in Wolf Hall, which brought another Emmy nomination.
It’s a formidable acting CV.
Yet the music came first.
Lewis picked up the guitar as a teenager, hooked on 1950s rock ’n’ roll and Elvis. Long before Hollywood came calling, he was already doing the hard yards on his motorbike around Europe with a guitar, a tent and about 60 songs in his back pocket, busking from one place to the next and, by his own admission, making a fair bit of noise along the way.
He remembers it as fairly rudimentary: “just me and my acoustic and shouting in the street”.
People made requests and, with 60-odd songs at his disposal, Lewis could generally produce the goods — or at least something close enough. Bowie, Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones and Lenny Kravitz were all in there.
And that’s when we discover Brixton.
I tell him I remember Kravitz exploding onto the scene and thinking I’d never seen anything quite like him.
“I remember seeing him live at Brixton Academy,” Damian says.
“So did I!”
And suddenly the years concertina: two 20-year-old redheads somewhere in that same heaving Brixton crowd, watching Kravitz prowl the stage in all his swaggering rock ’n’ roll glory.
His old busking spirit hasn’t disappeared either. Lewis still makes a point of giving money to buskers when he passes them and, rather wonderfully, he’s even gone back to it himself, not for the cash (I hasten to add). “A couple of years ago I was busking on the streets of New York,” he tells me. “I just went out for fun.”
It also knocks on the head any idea that Lewis has reached his fifties and suddenly decided being a musician might be a bit of fun. Music has run alongside acting for most of his life; for a long time, it stayed backstage.
That changed with Mission Creep, his debut album, released in June 2023. A rootsy collection drawing on blues, folk, rock and jazz, it announced that Lewis was taking the music seriously.
For album number two, he wanted to push things further.
“I just wanted it to be a bit more front-foot. A bit more coming at you. An energy in a different sort of way.”
That brought him to Guy Chambers, the songwriter and producer whose work with Robbie Williams alone has put his fingerprints over some of Britain’s biggest pop songs.
“Guy’s brilliant,” says Lewis. “He’s very clear about the way a song should work, and he’ll tell you in no uncertain terms. He’s very black and white.
“His ego doesn’t take over. He doesn’t start telling you a song should sound like this or sound like that. He’s good at just enhancing what you have.”
He was, however, fairly ruthless when Lewis became too attached to his words.
There were moments when Chambers wanted the chorus while Lewis was still hanging on to another verse because there were “nice things” he wanted to say in it.
The response was essentially: say them earlier and get on with it.
It’s the discipline of one of Britain’s most successful pop songwriters applied to somebody coming from a rather different musical place — and Lewis loved it.
Sweet Chaos feels broader and more muscular than its predecessor. Recorded with friend and mentor Richard Hawley and featuring Alison Mosshart of The Kills on the closing track, ‘Fix Me Up’, it moves through blues-rock, love, memory and some of the more chaotic moments in Lewis’s own life.
The title comes from an idea he describes rather beautifully: a man whose life is gilded, charmed and blessed, who believes himself in control until chaos arrives — only to discover that chaos can release all manner of things, including freedom.
There’s anger in there too, although he quickly corrects me when I suggest it might be an angry record.
“It’s not an angry record, but there are one or two songs in there that have got a bit of anger in them, and I quite like that.”
Then comes a line I rather love.
“Anger is a positive energy if you use it.”
Well, as one redhead to another, I know exactly where he’s coming from.
I tell him I’ve always felt being ginger gives you a little extra power, and before long we’re discussing red hair with the gravity normally reserved for affairs of state.
“Do you mythologise your red hair?” he asks.
Absolutely.
Lewis certainly does.
His particular irritation is with people who spent years firmly identifying as strawberry blonde while genuine redheads endured the playground cries of “Ginger!”, only to decide they were suddenly one of us once red hair became fashionable.
There have to be standards.
Photoshoot by Steve Gullick for Northern Life Magazine
There’s also something fitting about the conversation because Lewis seems to have little appetite for being pigeonholed anywhere else either.
Actor. Musician. Why does one have to cancel out the other?
“I perform roles as an actor, and I write music as well,” he says. “I just want people to come and listen to the music and take the music at face value. That’s the most important thing to me.”
He puts it even more bluntly when we get onto Henry VIII.
If somebody turns up at one of his gigs thinking, “Bloody hell, Henry VIII’s written an album”, they’re probably making life unnecessarily complicated for themselves!”
One collision between Lewis the actor and Lewis the music obsessive he’d happily encourage.
If he could play any musician, past or present?
“I’ve always wanted to play Bowie.”
No hesitation.
Bowie has been there since those early busking days and surfaces again in the DNA of Sweet Chaos. Lewis describes him simply as “magnificent”, and you sense it isn’t only the music he admires but that refusal to stay obediently in one box.
There’s a bit of that in Lewis too.
For someone who has worked on productions of enormous scale, he positively lights up when the conversation returns to Holmfirth Picturedrome and the prospect of a crowd packed close to the stage.
“God, I love it. I love playing in clubs. I love the energy. Everyone crammed in there, being close to them on stage.”
The tour will lean heavily on Sweet Chaos, with songs from Mission Creep and perhaps a couple of covers thrown in “just for fun”.
Will there be dancing?
Apparently there’ll be no Tom Jones-style gyrating.
Shame.
And you can’t play Holmfirth without facing another important question. This is Last of the Summer Wine country, after all, so which one is Damian Lewis: Compo, Clegg or Foggy?
“Definitely Compo.”
Straight in. Not even a pause.
To be fair, there is something rather Compo about a man who’ll happily busk on the streets, turn up in Holmfirth with a ping-pong bat and, as I’m about to discover, commit unspeakable acts against chips.
Compo credentials established, it’s time to see how he fares on the rest of his northern citizenship test.
Yorkshire pudding or Lancashire hotpot?
‘Yorkshire pudding.’
Good lad.
Proper brew or a pint in the pub?
‘Pint.’
Blackpool or Brighton?
There’s a slight pause. He senses danger.
‘Blackpool.’
He’s doing well.
Then it all goes horribly wrong.
Gravy on chips?
‘Crime of the century!’
I’m genuinely appalled.
What does Damian Lewis put on his chips?
Ketchup. Loads of it.
You think you know someone!
He claws back a little respect by choosing roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, with plenty of horseradish, as his national dish, although his suggestion that it needs only “a bit” of gravy indicates there’s still work to do.
Perhaps Sweet Chaos is as good a description of Damian Lewis’s career as it is of his second album. He’s gone from busking around Europe to playing soldiers, spies, kings and billionaires; from singing Bowie on street corners to wanting to play the man himself; and, all these years later, he’s still quite happy to pick up a guitar and head wherever the mood takes him.
What emerges, though, is less a man with several careers than one who simply refuses to sit neatly in the box marked “actor”. There’s the music, the redhead tribalism, the Compo instinct, the competitive streak and that deeply questionable stance on gravy.
There remains, however, unfinished business.
Ping-pong.
I tell him I’ll be at Holmfirth Picturedrome and might hold him to that mid-gig challenge.
“I think that might have to happen.”
He can bring the band. He can bring the bat.
I’ll bring the northern confidence that got me into this mess in the first place.
Sweet Chaos is out now! Visit the tour schedule below:
Read the rest of the original article at Northern Life Magazine.