– Fan Fun “Song of the Week” Series –
by Damianista | Fan Fun With Damian Lewis | September 17, 2025
“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
In his Instagram post about his shows in Ireland, Damian has said that new songs from his second album, out next spring, will get an outing as well as the songs we know and love from Mission Creep. It is one of those new songs that I would love to dive into today: Pentonville Prison. And before I get into it, if you missed 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! 🙂
Damian gives us the rest of his story about the motorcycle accident at his gig in Boisdale of Canary Wharf in May 2024:
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.
Read the rest of the original article at Fan Fun With Damian Lewis