Live Review

Damian Lewis at The Garage

Words by The Pit Standard · Photography by Marianne Brits

Damian Lewis at The Garage, London — 2026-10-14

Damian Lewis has a second act, and he's taking it seriously.

Damian Lewis has a second act, and he's taking it seriously. With two albums released and a UK tour underway, music is becoming a substantial part of his working life, rather than a footnote to his acting career. The Garage date on 14 October featured support from Essex and London-based singer-songwriter Harry Mold.

‘Makin’ Plans’ opened the set, followed by ‘Pentonville Prison’, which Lewis introduced with an account of his 1998 motorcycle accident. Riding home after a performance at the Barbican, he crashed outside Pentonville Prison in north London and was thrown through a car windscreen. He switched to acoustic guitar for the song.

Lewis’s introductions were often as revealing as the songs themselves. Before ‘King’, he explained that he had worked with Guy Chambers and that they had co-written one track together. ‘King’ was the result, bringing Chambers’s songwriting into Lewis’s own musical project.

Lewis introduced ‘Traffic Jam’ as “sweet thoughts on a shitty day”, setting up a song about the frustrations of everyday life. Its reference to David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ brings Major Tom into the decidedly less glamorous business of sitting in traffic. The contrast between Bowie’s cosmic isolation and a mundane journey gives the song its humour, with Lewis finding an amusing angle on a situation most people will recognise.

Alison Mosshart joined him for ‘No Man’s Land’, returning later for ‘Fix Me Up’. The Kills vocalist has a presence quite distinct from Lewis’s, and the contrast gave both songs a different character. Rather than appearing for a single guest spot, she returned for a second performance, making her contribution a more substantial part of the night. It was a pairing that worked on stage without needing to be dressed up as an event in itself.

The choice of covers brought two very different songwriting legacies into the set. Tom Waits’s ‘Little Trip to Heaven’, performed with Lewis at the keyboard, drew on the work of an artist whose songs often blur the line between jazz, blues and cabaret. Neil Young’s ‘Harvest Moon’ offered a gentler contrast, its enduring appeal evident as the audience joined in with the chorus. Both songs have outlasted the eras in which they were written, but for different reasons: Waits for his distinctive musical world, Young for the emotional directness of his songwriting.

The touring band gave Lewis the means to move between these different sides of the set, with Rudi Falla on guitar, Edward Felix Taylor on bass, Jesse Doniach on keys, and Will Cleasby and Josh Lines sharing the drumming duties across the tour. Their presence matters because Lewis’s songs draw on more than one musical vocabulary. The live arrangements need to accommodate the blues roots of his earlier work, the wider reach of the new album and the changes in tone that come with a cover or guest appearance. The band provided the setting for that range without making the evening feel like a showcase for the musicians themselves.

The encore paired ‘Leech’ with ‘She Comes’, keeping the final stretch within Lewis’s own repertoire. For someone whose public identity has long been shaped by acting, the more interesting question is not whether he can make the leap into music, but what he wants to do with the opportunity. At The Garage, the answer was in the material itself: songs drawn from personal experience, everyday absurdity and a broad set of musical interests. Lewis is still defining the boundaries of this part of his career, and the value of Sweet Chaos lies in hearing him work that out on his own terms.

Setlist

Makin’ Plans / Pentonville Prison / Down on the Bowery / King / Traffic Jam / No Man’s Land / Advent / Question Mark / Wanna Grow Old in Paris / Sweet Chaos / Grey at the Temple / Little Trip to Heaven (Tom Waits cover) / Harvest Moon (Neil Young cover) / A Man Named Sal / Fix Me Up