Necropolitan is Nigh: Interview with Green Lung

Ahead of the long-awaited fourth album from British doom favourites Green Lung, lead singer Tom Templar visited us at our Soho store for a chat about the new release 'Necropolitan', the occult map they've specially created for it (a love letter to metal London, featuring yours truly), the album's core inspiration and theme of the historic 'Magnificent Seven' cemeteries of London, and what it was like walking in the footsteps of Priest and Queen at Rockfield Studios.

'Necropolitan' releases on September 11 on Nuclear Blast Records - have a listen on Spotify at the end of the interview.

These themes have been kicking around in my head for years! When I was about 21, I tried writing a kind of culty mystery novel set in London and I loved the whole idea that there were these seven cemeteries around the city and I did a bunch of research. The novel I never got very far with, but I had a bunch of stuff that I'd been working on that was just in a drawer somewhere.

I just love, you know, within London, there aren't that many green spaces and then you have like the cemeteries, which are completely wild and haven't kind of been groomed by the parks. They're like these strange places.

When I first came to London I moved to West Norwood, down south, which is where one of the cemeteries is - the name Green Lung originally came from the signage of that, like they're [called] the "green lungs of London" - so these themes go quite far back, and then [me] being a nerd, I just went and visited all seven, to sort of tick them off.

Obviously Highgate is the daddy - the amazing one with the Egyptian art. It's the one that's been in lots of movies and it's got this amazing King Kong style Egyptian centre to it, which is just like goth Disneyland vibes.

I played around with some of these ideas because we did this whole graveyard song on the second album and that was all set in Highgate - in the 70s, there was this rumour that vampires were living in the cemetery so I did a song based on that. 

Woodland Rites was like a sort of spring album, Black Harvest was kind of autumn, This Heathen Land was kind of summer, and this album in my head was like winter and death and the absence of nature.

The doom theme of the band is all about climate change and humankind basically destroying itself and nature winning. It felt like the cemeteries were a really good illustration of that.

They were all built for incredibly rich people in Victorian times. They're really majestic graves, like they were supposed to be these eternal [things] inspired by ancient Egypt and were supposed to be this sort of forever place where these people would be revered for years to come.

Yeah, right! But they were forgotten about really quickly, like 50 years later, because they all ran out of money and the companies that ran these places went bankrupt.

So they just basically got left to nature, and they were covered in overgrowth, foxes, and bats and stuff.

I guess I was thinking a lot about the tech industry and the sort of worldview that underpins it and the idea that we're always going to get to this sort of heaven and it doesn't matter what we do here.

So it just felt like such a good, doomy subject matter and I was just thinking I know this world really well now, having lived here for 15 years, and I just wanted to do a kind of London album. I think it's probably also 'cause it's nearly 10 years since we started next year and I kind of just wanted to do a love letter to the scene - and that's the map that comes with the album!

It features The Black Heart, you know, Helgi's, you guys... In the same way that there's a sort of occult London of the cemeteries, and weird sites, and a Sphinx on the Thames that's in here, and 50 Berkeley Square, which is the most haunted house in London that we've got a song about.

I mean, there's so many great places here. The record shops are incredible - like Rise Above Records and Crypt of the Wizard. The place I've probably spent the most time is Helgi's. We shot a music video there as well.

It's hard to pick, honestly. I really like that some of this stuff doesn't exist anymore as well, like, Le Macabre was a coffee bar in Soho that had like skeletons on the walls and you had your coffee on a coffin. This is like 1964 - kind of - before Sabbath, before heavy metal.

Le Macabre one was something I came across in research and I was just like, "How have I not heard of that, you know?".

So it's just trying to go beyond the usual kind of like, "Oh, Goth started in the Batcave club". It's actually like there's been a sort of weird Gothic culture that goes really far back.

Yeah, I think it's all connected. It's funny, as someone who grew up in the country and then moved to the city ... it's really easy to see the city as an entirely modern thing and it's easy to look at the countryside and think it's not modern. But I don't really believe that - I think they both have hidden places and a sort of occult geography.

It's easy to find or feel it in the countryside maybe, but it's more satisfying to find it [the occult] in the city in a way, because it's more rare and kind of special.

I think the tilt towards the occult was really fun 'cause it's just a bit sexier. I think this is more of a pure rock album, you know theres less kind of its more riff based. The whole thing that Scott wanted to do was go back to the live sound and just try and capture what we sound like live in quite a raw way.

We literally recorded rhythm guitar, bass, and drums all live, which actually was crazy in terms of how much time it opened up when we were there. We had nine days at Rockfield Studios, which isn't that long.

But with the last album, we toured it loads we got to the US for the first time and did a really big European tour for 5 weeks last year, so we just were way tighter.

It was really fun to kind of focus on the songwriting a bit more. I think it's actually really hard to be more 'naked' sound-wise. If you've just got one guitar track, the riff has to be really fucking good. You're so much more exposed and that's the weird thing.

When you first start off, you know, it is really psychy, but what that psychy-ness is doing a lot of the time is hiding the fact that we're not playing as well as we are now. 

So it’s kind of a weird thing for people to listen to as well, because they might think it sounds cleaner or whatever.

So I think its kind of a weird thing as a musician, 'cause I was always a fan first. I was only a musician in my late 20s—I hadn't started singing properly. So I still come to it as a fan, and sometimes I'm like, 'Do you lose atmosphere from having a more stripped-back sound?'

I didn't want to go too far down the studio Beatles-y 'let's try every single kinda possible technique' route. It's also dangerous now because technology has come so far that you can do anything in a studio. You know, our whole band is about analog and vinyl and doing things in an old-school way.

And you can get tempted if you have a label who's actually paying you a decent advance and you're like going up the food chain a bit. It's really tempting to be like, 'Oh, let's sit around for a month and just tinker it up'.

But actually, it felt like a good exercise to deny ourselves things creatively rather than just go further down the Heathen Land route.

I'm not saying we won't go back to doing [that]. I don't know, it will be interesting - I think each album's a reaction against what you've just done - well, for us anyway.

I'm always like, 'Okay, I want to do something different this time'. There's a really clear kind of thing we do, but it would be really boring if we were just doing the exact same thing each time.

So the live thing and the focus on the occult and London felt like enough of a - not like a pivot, but it's not Heathenland 2 - which is nice. I never really want to do the same thing twice.

Yeah, it was great! It was wake up at 9, get in the studio at 10, work through till 10 in the evening. It was long days and I kind of loved it. It was my favorouite studio experience we've had, because we were just ‘in it’ for nine days.

We weren't, you know, we used to record in Haggerston and you'd finish at 6 and go back home. You're just slightly out of the mindset.

Just knowing that Judas Priest had done Sad Wings of Destiny there and Queen had literally recorded part of Bohemian Rhapsody in the other barn.

It's an amazing place 'cause they haven't changed anything. The farmer's like 80 - it's the same guy [running it].

He was looking after the sheep and stuff, and he was like (in a Welsh country accent) , 'I haven't heard a riff like that for a while!', it was sweet. 

It hasn't been bought out, it hasn't been tarted up. It's like the same gear. We were recording on, I think like Elton John or Rod Stewart's old mixing desk - it was a vintage, massive leather desk. All of the shit is original.

The echo chambers are literally in a barn across the way, so they like pipe it all in and just play it and record the echo. You're not just sort of putting an echo on it with a computer.

It was weird though, I thought it would be more intimidating, but I think because it was like low-key a farm, there's something quite cosy about it, too. I never felt like, 'Oh shit'.

We'd also recorded a bit with Tom before, he'd mixed the last album - he's worked with Opeth, Ghost, and Rammstein - but he's kind of just like us. He's just like a joker and loves a lot of the same music we do. So it felt weirdly like we were at home, I guess. 

I'd be surprised if we didn't go back there at some point, because it's so perfect for us and what we do.

I still want to go and record at the studio where Judas Priest recorded Screaming for Vengeance in Ibiza, where they're in Speedos - they were just in Ibiza shredding.

Every fucking Green Lung album is always recorded in December and January, and it's always pissing it down, miserable, and like misty. I don't know if it would ruin the album if we did it in the summer, but for the next one I'm kind of like, "Can we just do this?".

Yeah, exactly! But maybe that'll ruin it all. We'll see.

She's awesome. We took them out on their first-ever tour in the States about three years ago. I'd come across on Instagram or something and I just thought they'd be really fun.And obviously, she worked at The Great Frog, didn't she?smaller bands back from the past.

I can't remember what the connection was initially, but our booking agent was like, "Who do you want to support?" And I was like, "Oh, look at Castle Rat." And he was like, "They've never really toured before," and I was like, "I don't care."

And then they've just blown up from that point on! But actually, we all became mates. They were driving around in this ridiculous vintage van and we were doing this East Coast tour of about nine shows and we just got on really well.

I actually saw their show in LA when I was there on holiday and they were doing House of Blues, and they’d sold it out, and it was amazing watching how far they'd come. When we played with them in Philly, you couldn't get on stage without walking through the crowd, so it was Riley in her chainmail side-boob, and Josh as the druid, having to squeeze through all these metal fans in this tiny venue.

They're so old school like that, at that point, we were playing 300 to 400 capacity rooms—it was our first time out. We sold them all out, which was great, but bringing that level of costume was really cool to see. It reminded me of what it must have been like for KISS back in the day.

So we had this song, 'Alostrael', which is all about Aleister Crowley's American girlfriend. She was an artist he lived with for a while and she was sort of his muse and I just kind of wanted some iron maiden style narration at he beginning , adn i really want an American woman to read this, because [insert name] was American. And I was like, "Oh yeah, I know an American woman!" So that was really cool.

We're actually playing Summer Breeze with them next month in Germany, we're playing on the same day, so we’ll get to hang out again. But they're doing so well, it's really cool to see. I'm sure next time if we tour the States with them, we'll be supporting them! They're blowing up!

It was very much inspired by a German TV show called Beat-Club, which basically had like Sabbath, all the big prog bands like Deep Purple and I just found it on YouTube. I was like, why does every live video from this era have this weird chroma-key background?

So I just looked it up and we were like, "Let's just do our own version of this show."

There are some amazing videos on there that people should check out: ther’s a really good Deep Purple 'Highway Star', and Lucifer's Friend - this Italian band who did a song called 'Ride the Sky', which is kind of a Sabbath-style song but with a French horn on it - it’s completely mental.

Yeah, it's probably the same show! It must be, 'cause it is literally that really trippy, psychedelic blast of colours where you're like, 'What?'. And the band members are like bleeding into the background.

I just love it, it's crazy. We wanted to homage that. 

We had this animator, Joe, doing some visuals for Desertfest and so he was the perfect person to animate it.

That's one thing I'm really excited about with the tour, we've got all of Richard's art animated now, which is just going to be a new dimension. It’s like you were saying with Castle Rat they’re so their costumes - our aesthetic has always been on the album covers. We've never really had the budget to make it more immersive until now - so I think that's gonna be really fun.

Joe's been brilliant at getting the spirit of the band into the lighting show. I never really wanted to do that whole horror movie projection thing that's been done to death - Electric Wizard is always going to do that better or Uncle Acid - so I wanted to do something that's a bit more us.

I think there are ways to keep the spirit of the original Green Lung, but actually just kinda manifest it on stage a bit more. The bigger the venues get, the more scope you have. But what you don't want to do is suddenly make it look really digital or shit.

So its kind like this really fun thing at the moment where all this stuff we've been playing around with for years, you get to go, "Okay, well if we've got the budget to do animations and a big light show, you know it feels like it's in the spirit of the original record, like Woodland Rites.

You know, we've grown at a very steady rate, so it's always stayed fucking niche as hell, but it just grows.

You never know until you put something out. But I think with this one, I was really conscious of that as well. I think there are traps -  you can get too obsessed with trying to make something work on Spotify or something, but actually, we're not a Spotify band. We're vinyl, we're old school... drawing on much older influences and it's much more about the storytelling and the art. It's not designed for like a YouTube thumbnail - it's supposed to be a physical thing, and I think that's why people come to the shows as well, because it is like a real old-school rock show, but the more we can do that, the more fun it is, [with] like props and videos.

Yeah, 100%! I think people get embarrassed to do it almost, it's like putting effort in isn't cool. But actually, when you look at classic metal like Dio and stuff, the sets are amazing.

Having not been able to go to any of that shit when we were young, the best we can get is doing it ourselves!

At the moment, [it would be] doing the Roundhouse show for Desertfest, as that's where we started the band. The Forum was absolutely amazing, too.

The first few gigs at The Black Heart... I remember we first sold out The Black Heart for the launch of Woodland Rites and it felt huge to us. We were like, "Holy shit, people care about this!" I really remember being in the cupboard on the side of The Black Heart, hearing the crowd, and being like, 'Fuck, we've got to pull it off, boys!'

But that also never changes! It’s always like you’re in a cupboard somewhere being like, 'Shit, people are expecting us to step it up on this one', and its just the venue gets bigger!

Yeah, I’d say the two favourites would be selling out The Black Heart for the Woodland Rites launch and then Desertfest coming full circle. You know the first three or four rows of people, I knew everyone, you recognise all these fans who've been to loads of shows and it's just like immaculate vibes.

Witch Hazel I would give a big shout-out to. On paper, they're not a band I would think I'd like - it's very spiritual, and they sound like Wishbone Ash. They're on Bad Omen Records, which is Will from Rise Above Records' new label. But they're a few albums in. It's really warm, euphoric British metal that sounds totally authentic and really beautifully done. You wouldn't know it was a Christian rock band until you tuned into the lyrics! Its really unusual and I think they’re kinda underrated actually. 

I like Inhuman Nature, the thrash band. I think London hasn't really had a thrash band that good, maybe ever. Really cool power-trippy vibes. I love them, I first saw them at the Dome and they were fucking sick.

More widely, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are really great. Matt, their lead singer, he and I get on and he’s kinda like a cross between Lemmy and Stone Cold Steve Austin live! He's in his gym shorts and muscle vest, just fucking wailing. They are a band that really make so much sense live— they remind me of Hawkwind - super repetitive, heavy, riffy. I love them.

Who am I missing? Lowen, who we've toured with, are a super interesting band. I’d be really intrigued to see where they go. Their first album was kind of doomy, but then second album was Morbid Angel kind of vibes - blast beats, but with amazing Persian traditional singing. It reminds me a bit of Nile and like old-school death metal, but its not that, it's own thing.

In the London scene as well, there are bands like Boars head and Warp Stormer and a few of our mates' stoner metal bands who are really the backbone of the scene. Bands like Elephant Tree too, obviously. Those guys put us on really early on.

I'm going with 'Ozymandias', because it's the closest we've ever done to an Iron Maiden song. I just know it's going to feel insane live. It's epic, it has high screams, massive riffs, and it sounds like vintage Maiden to my ear.

I also think 'To the Gallows Born', which is the last song [on the album], is like my version of 'My Way' [by Frank Sinatra]. But like the idea of a guy at the gallows about to be hanged being like, "Ah, fuck all of you guys!" - and it's about being on stage in a way and its going to be more meaningful to me than anyone else, because its sort of the sense that every night you're going out onto the gallows, essentially and you might fucking die! There's something funny about that song for me as a singer. 

I love the Coffin Ring, I love the Bat Ring - I had a cat called Mervyn so I love the Cat Ring.

I had my eye on that ridiculous castle candle that you guys had! That was one of the sickest things I've seen in a while.

I just love that The Great Frog is a great example of maybe the longest-running, uninterrupted, heavy metal-oriented business in London. Places like Crowbar have gone by the wayside and you guys have managed to hang on in your same workshop. It's fucking amazing.

There's so much uninterrupted history here. And I think some places you just feel like oh they've just taken this history and it's not the same thing, but it still feels like it's in the same family right. 

It's a rare and beautiful thing, and it's kind of mind-blowing to me that it's still going. 

There's pieces here that haven't changed in ages because they were originally fucking cool and you didn't sell out and fuck it up.

But I find [this] too with Green Lung, I want to keep it real to what the original vision is, but you've got to move with the times slightly to open up to different audiences. You guys have done a similar thing: it's like this fine line between shifting your identity just to sort of keep up, versus having a really strong identity and shifting what you're doing to keep up.