Green Lung are back, and they've left the wyrdness of rural England for the capital's own occult strangeness. As they prepare to give the first taste of new album Necropolitan when they headline Desertfest this weekend, Tom Templar and Scott Black take us through London's Magnificent Seven Cemeteries, reflect on being one of Britain's best bands, and how massive un-developable graveyards in a massive city are actually pretty punk...
There’s an unreleased manuscript for a book nobody’s ever seen that Tom Templar wrote when he was a teenager living out in rural East Anglia. What he refers to as “my shitty novel” was deeply researched, and would, in the fullness of time, turn out to capture a lot of very Green Lung things before Green Lung were even a band: folklore, the occult, myths and legends, history.
Alongside this expected rural noir, one of the few details he’ll divulge is how it also showed from a young age a fascination with the capital of this heathen land.
“I was sort of looking at London as this exciting, faraway place,” he explains. “Lots of the occult stuff that that I was encountering, Highgate Cemetery and places like that, felt almost mythical. There’s lots of things about London that are just strange…”
Welcome to Green Lung’s London, the setting for their brilliant new album, Necropolitan. Inspired in part by the city’s famous, sprawling Magnificent Seven Cemeteries – Highgate, Kensal Green, West Norwood, Abney Park, Brompton, Tower Hamlets and Nunhead – it tells of a place that is often very strange, indeed.
The first cut, Evil In This House, tells of the weird goings on at 50 Berkeley Square in Mayfair. A home that in the 19th century earned itself the reputation as the capital’s most haunted house, the attic is said to be frequented by the spirit of a girl who jumped out of the window and died while escaping an abusive uncle. Other stories tell of a child murdered by a servant. One longtime Victorian resident, Thomas Myers, spent 15 years there apparently as a completely nocturnal and increasingly mad recluse.
Elsewhere, there’s vampires – don’t forget, Dracula did loads of his business in the capital, rather than on the remote moors – there’s Victorian backstreets, there’s strange arcana that’s almost lost in the wealth of this stuff in the town the band now call home.
“I can’t think of a more occult city, except maybe Paris,” says Tom. And London’s full of it, stretching right the way back to Roman Londinium. “You're never really more than a few streets away from something truly arcane and weird, because there's such a deep history here.”
Indeed, there’s a wealth of secret societies, weird rituals, “strange little occult nooks” as the singer puts it. Just as 2023’s This Heathen Land, the album that made Green Lung one of the fastest-rising cult bands in Britain, was a loving tribute to the ways and stories of old Albion, the product of growing up in small villages where ploughing competitions were a good afternoon out, Necropolitan salutes The Big Smoke’s role in Green Lung’s fortunes.
“It’s a love letter to the city that created the band,” says Tom. “None of us are from London. We’re all from the country, but we all came here, this is where we found each other, this is where the band was born.”
“The record is a love letter to the city that created the band”
We join Tom and guitarist Scott Black in a pub by London Bridge. “We’re not far from the Temple Of Mithras, just over the river,” notes Tom, proving the capital’s spooky credentials. “They were this pagan cult from, like, 2,000 years ago, and their temple was uncovered in the ’50s.”
Both – especially the singer – can talk at length about their new album and the themes behind it. Recorded at Wales’ legendary Rockfield Studio, where Judas Priest laid down Sad Wings Of Destiny, Queen made A Night At The Opera, Oasis knocked out (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, and once again working with production genius Tom Dalgety (who earned his spurs working at the studio), the location was a marker of just what a rise Green Lung have had over the past three years. Last year, the band – Tom and Scott, bassist Joseph Ghast, drummer Matt Wiseman and keyboardist John Wright – headlined the O2 Forum Kentish Town. This weekend, they hit the Roundhouse as headliners of Desertfest, the festival where they were pretty much born.
“Going somewhere like that seems like one of those unattainable things, doesn't it?” ponders Scott. “In my head, I sometimes still kind of think of us as that band playing all dayers at The New Cross Inn. As soon as I stepped foot in that place, it was like a 15 year old again. It was surreal getting to play the Killer Queen piano. The SSL units that Brian May recorded through were all the ones we used for the guitar as well.”
Scott calls Necropolitan a “kind of punk, Black Sabbath” album, with fewer of the folk moments that featured on This Heathen Land. It’s a more direct hit than its predecessor, but bursting with the same vibrancy and depth.
“That Britishness has always been the heart of Green Lung,” says Scott. “Doing the London idea was a way to slightly widen the universe without losing focus of what it is.”
“People think of folklore as a rural thing, and it's not. It's absolutely not,” agrees Tom. “In the song To The Gallows Born, there’s the line, ‘I've always sworn upon the horns’. That’s a folky ceremony they do in Highgate, a sort of Lord Of Misrule type thing, where the servant becomes the king. It's done in the pubs, swearing on these old horns. That’s just as folkloric as something that goes on in a village pub.”
“It's quite a clever sidestep from Tom,” adds Scott. “We've ploughed that folklore furrow quite deeply by now. There's always been quite a big crossover in terms of British horror and that kind of Victoriana, but no-one’s really writing songs about it. They weren't writing songs about Nunhead Cemetery.”
It’s the cemeteries that provide particular fascination, and weave most strongly into the band. At the start of the Victorian era, the Magnificent Seven were built as places for the ultra-rich to RIP in luxury and style. But, says Tom, “they weren’t left to anyone, so within 100 years, they were already completely overgrown and fucked up and full of like junkies and weirdos and foxes and stupid metal bands, vampire hunters…”
Obviously, these places are loaded with hearsay. Just one example is The Hannah Courtoy Mausoleum in Brompton Cemetery, believed to be a time-machine. Since the 1960s, they’ve been maintained and restored by volunteers. Ironically, these gardens for the dead have become places for rewilding of nature in the city.
“They’re quite literally green lungs,” grins Tom. He himself admits to breaking into West Norwood “in the middle of the night to smooch a girl”, while Scott, by his own admission “not much of an evil-seeker”, finds their status as habitats for endangered bats and plants a brilliant middle-finger to more malevolent and mundanely human forces at work around them.
“I find it bitterly ironic that these cemeteries were all started by private companies, and now they’re the only places safe from having their real estate squeezed,” says Scott. “You see how HMO places and ruthless corporate landlords work, and the only places that aren’t in danger from that are full of corpses. We'll treat the dead with all this deference, but we won't treat the living with any at all.”
“There's something very funny to me about the fact that no-one can build on them, no-one can do anything with them,” laughs Tom. “They're just a sort of weird pockmark on this capitalist city. They're unmovable. It's the most Green Lung thing ever, a cemetery fighting against encroaching developers through being goth co-op squats, basically.”
As ever, there’s a wealth of research and real stuff behind everything. The speedy, Hellacopters-ish rock‘n’roll of Necropolitan Line deals with the dead in a different way. Partly a thrilling hymn to the joys of staying out late and finding sin and fun in a city where ‘We come alive in the dead of night’, it’s also another example of how ingrained this stuff is to the town.
The actual Necropolitan Line was the Victorian train line established in 1854 by The London Necropolitan Railway (“Even their logo has skulls and memento mori stuff on it,” notes Tom). Running between Waterloo and Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, one of the biggest burial sites in the world, the idea was to export London’s dead to be buried outside the city “for centuries to come”.
“Even though they were dead, there were first, second and third class. It was absolutely absurd,” laughs Tom. “To me, it was a peak Victorian thing. I love the idea of like the dead basically emerging once a month to hunt the living and using this old necropolis railway.”
Black Magic Radio, meanwhile, finds Green Lung tripping through pre-rock’n’roll occult Soho of the first half of the 20th century, “heavy metal before heavy metal.”
“I wanted to write about counterculture, but I didn’t want to just write a song about The Cart And Horses or somewhere,” he says. “Before Siouxsie Sioux and that goth culture, it was already there, in a way. The lyrics mention Le Macabre, which was a cafe in Soho that where the tagline was: ‘Your coffee on a coffin.’ There were spooky skellingtons on the walls and stuff.
“Then you keep going back, and the counterculture is still there, just not how you think of it as starting in the 1960s or ’70s. You go back to the Edwardian times, and Aleister Crowley is there doing psych stuff. He’s tripping, he's wearing psychedelic clothes, he's expressing free love, he's dabbling in the occult, 50 years before Haight Ashbury and hippies and stuff. London's been the centre of that kind of occult thinking for a long time.”
This knowledge, this study of what they’re on about, is part of what has made Green Lung so popular. Oddly for subjects so often far from reality, the depth of work that’s gone into their world feels actually very real. It’s the difference between taking a vague AI half-answer, and actually sitting down and reading a book written by someone who knows what they’re talking about.
As a well-read man who actually works in book publishing, this is important to Tom. Not just for his band, but as a fundamental part of music culture itself.
“Heavy metal used to be extremely literate genre of music,” he says. “Literature was so important to it. Look at Iron Maiden, working class guys from Leyton, but they were singing about Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Black Sabbath as well, Geezer Butler was into sci-fi and occult stuff. Then there’s Mastodon doing a whole album about Moby Dick [Leviathan]. That’s amazing!
“Green Lung has always been a literature-adjacent heavy metal band. I don't want to be Iron Maiden, but I want people to feel like they know what our albums are going to give them. It's going to be well researched. It’s going to be musically awesome. And it’s going to make you want to find out more.”
“Metal will be in real trouble if it loses its literacy... It’s shit if people don’t dig when they’re writing”
Though he worries about sounding all “old man yells at cloud”, Tom also has a genuine worry that this is something being lost.
“I think metal will be in real trouble if it loses its literacy. A lot of the things I really fucking hate in heavy metal are the illiteracy of it, and how no-one's going back to the roots of things. It’s shit if people don’t dig when they’re writing.
“People are so swipe, swipe, swipe, and a lot of people's appreciation of things are just aesthetic. I'll get a video of a half-arsed ’90s-looking Dungeons And Dragons thing with a funny name doing a funny song, and it's got 30,000 likes. Fine, but that's just so ephemeral. It's so shallow. When things are like that, or a fucking half-arsed reference to a video game, that's just boring to me.”
And, it seems, to their ever-growing audience. Like Iron Maiden, Green Lung actually do have people picking up books and digging into the history behind the songs and wanting to better understand the world of the music. Only last week, Scott says they got a message “from a guy who was coming over from France, and took his wife and daughter to visit a bunch of places from This Heathen Land.”
Tom, meanwhile, says that when the band were on tour with Clutch a couple of years ago, a fan told him that he himself was working on a novel, and had been listening to the band non-stop as he worked for inspiration. “That, for me, is the highest compliment.”
This weekend, Green Lung headline Saturday of Desertfest, at no less a venue than The Roundhouse, with a supporting cast picked from the British underground. It’s apt in the run-up to an album that celebrates how Green Lung London is.
Scott recalls a drunken 2am chat in Camden’s Black Heart during 2017’s do, at which it was decided to put a band together. Tom says the fest represents everything that was missing about being into the doomier side of metal out in the sticks. “There it’d be like, ‘Oh you like Metallica? How about Electric Wizard or Solitude Aeturnus?’, and you’d just get nothing. In London, everything I loved was available.” When they got to eventually play on the Black Heart stage, it felt like it couldn’t get any bigger or better.
“This band genuinely wouldn't exist without Desertfest,” says Scott. “It was very much born from that whole vibe. Honestly, I sometimes worry that I'm about to wake up and it's going to be 2017 all over again. But the band was invented there, so to be headlining 10 years later does feel absolutely surreal. I just wonder when my luck's gonna run out!”
“This sounds like woo-woo, but I remember years before we played The Forum, I had a stress dream about playing there,” offers Tom. “In the dream, I was Lee Dorrian from Cathedral, when they did their last gig there [in 2011]. It felt like a premonition or something.”
The difference between Green Lung and their legendary forebears, though, is that Green Lung are hitting these venues while they’re still coming up, not ending their journey. Even in a scene of genuinely cult bands, their success is unique not just in its size, but in its nature.
“At the Forum gig, we did a signing at The Black Heart,” says Tom as an example. “We walked there, and I thought there'd be a few people there, and it was fucking loads! They were all wearing Green Lung merch, someone made a cake. I just remember thinking, ‘That's what it's all about, a metal is community.’ Those people all have a weird cultural thing that they're into, and Green Lung gives them excuse to get together. And it's a beautiful thing.”
Though he “fucking hates Spotify”, it’s also given Tom an insight into who these people are. He’ll look at the data, and see plenty of crossover with bands they might play with, Uncle Acid And The Deadbeats, say, or Electric Wizard. “But then there's the other fan who's really into I Prevail or Alter Bridge.
“I'm kind of more interested in the people who don't know who Electric Wizard or Witchcraft or Graveyard are. I'm more interested in the person who somehow come across us and hasn't sort of been initiated into that little world that was so great for me creatively and so great for me as a kid. For some people, we could be that band who are what Cathedral were to me as a kid. That’s brilliant.”
Ask if they’ve got any premonitions for where the Necropolitan Line might yet take them, neither Tom nor Scott give any grandstanding answer. Things are, they say, just happening at a rate they’re keeping up with themselves. “We only got a manager in October last year,” laughs Tom.
“I think this has all happened because we believe in it,” says Scott. “We’re constantly surprised by what’s happening. But we feel really good about it.”
“The way we do things, the way we do the storytelling and stuff, the way people respond to what we are and what we represent, it feels great,” says Tom. “When I think about it, I’m excited about the next 10 years of Green Lung.”
And what does that look like?
“I don’t know,” he grins. “I'll just keep on doing the same old weird shit and see what happens.”
Necropolitan will be released September 11 via Nuclear Blast. Get your exclusive sparkle vinyl and glow-in-the-dark T-shirt bundle now.
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