The 1956 Elvis Presley song that changed Damian Lewis’ life: “I was stuck in the ’50s”
Lately, there have been quite a few clips doing the rounds on social media featuring the actor Damian Lewis giving it his all on stage with a guitar, belting out tunes without a care in the world, and the comments underneath these videos always seem to follow an interesting path.
Initially, the naysayers are straight in, asking why an actor in his mid-50s is living out his rock and roll dreams in public and criticising anything they can think of about the performances. But then more and more people leave statements in support of Lewis, praising him for doing exactly what he wants to, for responding to his personal grief by pushing himself to achieve milestones in his musical career and for treating age strictly as a number.
And it’s not like he had anything left to prove where acting is concerned, having had two decades of success since he broke through in the landmark HBO World War II drama Band of Brothers, going on to make award-winning TV shows on both sides of the pond like Billions and Wolf Hall.
It was after the death of his wife and fellow actor Helen McCrory in 2021 that he started to really put the wheels in motion to pursue the musical career he’d long wanted to achieve, and he worked with established artists, including the Italian-American jazz composer Giacomo Smith, releasing a first album called Mission Creep in 2023 and a second called Sweet Chaos this month.
That same year, Lewis found himself in the news when two of his loves converged, music and motorsports, for a moment that went viral, as he performed a quite strange, heavily Elvis Presley-influenced version of the British national anthem at the F1 Grand Prix at Silverstone, complete with saxophones and sunglasses.
Again, people were quite perplexed about it, but it was more evidence that Lewis basically does what he wants. And in that performance, he was showing the world that he absolutely loves Elvis, possibly more than anything else. And that’s not an understatement, given that he has admitted that for a long time as a teen, he genuinely believed he was the return of the Mississippi-born rock and roll legend.
Back in the day, Lewis would dress like Elvis, talk like him and was convinced he might be Presley incarnate, and a lot of that came down to his obsession with some of the most influential studio sessions in history. An 18-year-old Elvis paid a few dollars to have a demo recorded at Sun Records in Memphis in 1953 and later launched his career thanks to songs he put down at the studio.
That was the era that Lewis admired most, telling The Line of Best Fit: “Those Sun recordings were the Elvis I fell in love with. In the ‘80s, when we were all listening to lots of electro synth pop… I was stuck in the ‘50s. I thought I was Elvis. For a good chunk of my teens, I worked on my quiff endlessly, and I loved him.”
And one song in particular from those sessions struck a chord with Lewis, a 1955 blues cover that Elvis first released as a B-side, but that went on to be ranked as one of the greatest songs of all time. Lewis explained: “‘Mystery Train’ is brilliant because there’s no percussion in it. It’s amazing that when you listen to it, there’s no percussion; it’s all slap and flick on the bass. It’s got that early rock and roll bounce and groove that I always liked, which is why I think I missed punk. I was into that bebop, rock and roll sound. I loved it, that’s what I was listening to.”
