“I was riding home one night on my motorbike. I was in North London. I was on Caledonian Road. I was outside Pentonville Prison. Next thing I knew was I was flying through the air and going straight to the windscreen of a car. This is called Pentonville Prison.” – Damian Lewis
We can’t wait for Damian Lewis’ second album sometime this spring, and one of the songs we’re really rooting to see on the album is Pentonville Prison. We’ll be diving into that track this week in Damian Lewis’ Song of the Week series.
And before we get into it, if you missed any of the previous Song of the Week posts, you can find them all here.
Now, Pentonville is an actual prison on Caledonian Road in Barnsbury, North London. But don’t worry—the track isn’t about Damian doing time. Instead, it’s inspired by a motorbike accident he had right outside the prison many years ago.
The song’s title was “Fate” when Damian introduced it at Union Chapel in July 2023.
“Ok. We’ve got a couple of songs that are not on Mission Creep. And this is gonna be the world premiere of this song right here. And if you think it’s any good we’ll put it on the next album and bring you back here and force you to buy that one, too.”
Based on the applause it received, we knew the song would on the next album. I would personally love the song to be one of the singles Damian drops before releasing the second album. Oh, and thanks to Lewisto, we have a good recording of the song’s world premiere!
Damian shares the story behind Pentonville Prison on stage a few months later during his Mission Creep UK Tour. As he was going home one night on his motorcycle, a mini cab did suddenly back up and Damian directly hit the windshield. This happened on Caledonian Road near Pentonville Prison.
Damian sings:
“I lay face down
Split crown
Half drowned in the rain
An angel held my hand
A helmet held my brain.”
That helmet is everything!
And he shares a funny story at Norwich: After his gig in Bristol back in September 2023, a man approaches Damian and says that he is probably the only one that has got Pentonville Prison reference because he spent time there! 🙂
That’s a new song as well, ladies and gentlemen. Pentonville Prison. When I woke up, in the middle of Caledonian Road, there was a man squeezing my wrist so hard and shaking. My first thought when I woke up was ‘that’s not good.’
When Damian asks the man why he was squeezing his wrist so hard, he says he couldn’t tell whether Damian was dead or he himself was too pissed to know what he was doing.
“It turns out he was just pissed.”
The angel he talks about in the song is the person sitting at the back in the mini cab. He was an off duty male nurse who worked at Royal Free Hospital, and he put Damian in recovery position. Our guy was very lucky that night. So are we. And a mental note to self: Ask Damian whether the motorbike in Zaragoza and the one in Pentonville Prison are the same or not. There have been conflicted reports
Being a walking Damian Lewis encyclopedia, I can place the accident on Damian’s professional timeline. It was 1998 and our guy was a company member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. When he had the accident in front of Pentonville Prison, he was portraying Don John on stage in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing at the Barbican Theatre in London.
See the picture below to see our Don John plotting with Barochio to ruin Claudio’s wedding plans! Damian naturally has no idea at the time that he will bring a hilarious Benedick to life in BBC’s Much Ado About Nothing in Shakespeare Retold series a few years later. And he obviously has no idea that he will have a pretty scary motorcycle accident that would force him to take a break from the play.
Damian tells Indie London:
“I had just been on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company, we were doing Much Ado About Nothing. A cab pulled out, it was just a typical clichéd motorbike accident. Where I was the only thing in the road and I saw him 400 yards back and I got 200 and I thought ‘well he has obviously seen me’ and then 50. And then he just pulled out. It’s just one of those things when you are riding a bike, it’s going to happen to you at some point. People just don’t see you. Amazingly, I broke nothing but I had concussion for three months.”
It was a serious concussion in his brain’s frontal lobe – the region that controls emotions. For the next three months, he recalls, he became irritable and irrational. He could get into arguments with people at the video store (do you remember the video stores? So 20th century, isn’t it?) for no reason or suddenly felt like crying. He was not able to watch TV or read because of migraines and spent time doing jigsaw puzzles in his apartment instead of getting dressed. But he was also beginning to get restless to go on stage. Only three weeks after the accident, Damian rejoined the cast of Much Ado About Nothing. And he had to sit down on stage in the middle of a soliloquy during his first night back on stage.
“I gave the rest of my speech from there. If I hadn’t sat down, I would have keeled over. I probably wasn’t ready to go back.”
Now, you would never expect such a dramatic accident to shape an actor’s portrayal of a historical figure, would you? But that is exactly what Damian suggests. He believes the crash offered unexpected inspiration for his role as King Henry VIII in Wolf Hall. He draws a striking parallel between his own period of depression and personality changes after the motorbike accident and Henry’s infamous jousting accident in 1536. Damian argues that the king’s injury may have triggered his descent into paranoia and cruelty, showing how traumatic brain injuries can radically alter a person’s character.
And as if that inspiration weren’t enough, the experience also gave him a song. Not bad, huh? So here is Damian performing Pentonville Prison at Boisdale of Canary Wharf for you . Cheers!
