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. Damian Lewis says, “I wanted the album to give a sense of a journey to this point, from busking ‘til now.”

We can’t be sure of the set list, but if it’s anything like the other shows on this UK Tour then 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 usually plays his new songs Pentonville Prison and Traffic Jam. For encore he usually plays a cover of After Midnight and his other new song She Makin’ Me Change.We’re notoriously bad at ­changing lanes in this country,” he says. “I’m fully aware of how dangerous it is for me, tiptoeing into another area of the arts. It’s a bit like standing up on top of the parapet going, ‘Right, take your shots, everyone; throw s--- at me!’ ”

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 drama programme at Eton was brilliant. So if you had the talent or inclination, you could do drama 24/7 if you wanted toActually, he says, the project had its genesis the best part of a decade ago when he sang a couple of songs on a Radio 2 show. One of his fellow guests was the singer and broadcaster Cerys Matthews, whose husband, producer Steve Abbott, was impressed with Lewis’s performance. Abbott suggested that he and Lewis record some songs, but then Lewis spent the next five years playing hedge-fund manager Bobby Axelrod in the American drama series Billions. A couple of years ago, with McCrory seriously ill, Lewis asked to be written out of the sixth series so he could be with his family. That was when he reconsidered Abbott’s proposal.

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.” I always said I’m not doing ‘major’ label stuff, but Decca were very persuasive, very seductive and very supportive 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. We’re here to talk about the new drama, but as with so many men, his first language is football. Barely have I sat down and he’s chatting footie. Lewis, 51, is still a keen and talented player, who takes part regularly in Soccer Aid matches on behalf of Unicef. He tells me he recently played with Cafu, Brazil’s most capped male player, who is a year older than Lewis. “He’s kept himself in shape. He’s my age, charging around that pitch.” He asks me who I support. Manchester City, I say. And now he’s started on the phenomenal goal machine Erling Haaland. “He’s like a CGI construct. He could be out of Jurassic Park. He’s got an incredible physical form.” It’s so much easier than dealing with the stuff of life. But that’s not what we’re here for.The journey to this point began a long time ago. A fan of everyone from John Martyn and The Rolling Stones to Velvet Underground and Eddie Cochran, Lewis tried to write songs in his early twenties before his nerves got the better of him. “I didn’t feel comfortable doing it,” he tells Music Week. “I didn’t know how to do it, I wasn’t confident.” 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.” 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. Damian and his brilliant band played gig number nine of their UK Tour in Basingstoke at The Haymarket on Wednesday, November 1, 2023 in support of his debut album Mission Creep. We can’t be sure of the set list, but if it’s anything like the other shows on this UK Tour then 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 usually plays his new songs Pentonville Prison and Traffic Jam. For encore he usually plays a cover of After Midnight and his other new song She Makin’ Me Change. 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.