Behind Tom Templar’s shoulder as we talk over video call is a poster for The Wicker Man, the 1973 cult folk-horror film set on a remote Scottish island, whose sunniness conceals – inevitably – a dark secret. It’s fitting, because Templar is the singer of Green Lung, the breakout British metal band who immerse themselves in British mythology. The forthcoming Necropolitan, their fourth album devoted to the folklore of the isles, takes its inspiration from the “Magnificent Seven” London cemeteries built in the 1830s and 40s, and from the Necropolis railway, which transported the dead out of the city. No generic demons here: this is metal in the spirit of Fairport Convention as much as Black Sabbath.
“My big thesis is that heavy metal has become a form of folk music in the past couple of decades,” says Templar. “They’re both riff-based, circling around similar tropes, and about reinventing what has gone before. Metal even feels like a folk movement, in the way it’s full of festivals no one else has heard of. There’s such a thriving ecosystem.” Green Lung have certainly been nourished by it: at this year’s Desertfest in London, their T-shirts felt like an unofficial uniform.
UK black metal has experienced this folkloric crossover, with bands such as Old Corpse Road, Winterfylleth and Wodensthrone, and Shonagh Brown, singer of Newcastle folk-horror-metallers Druidess, has also noticed the evolution. “Metal had quite a Hammer horror focus, and that’s great when times are good,” she says. “When people are comfortable they seek escapism in the less comfortable. But people spend so much time in front of screens and want to shift towards the natural world, and the folk traditions connect with that.”
Green Lung and Druidess don’t just write about the past; they sound like it. There’s plenty of Black Sabbath in both, but lots more Deep Purple, especially in the prevalence of organ. It is more hard rock than metal: words are sung to be heard, melody matters. It’s music that reveres its history, both cult and occult. That big, rich sound, Brown, says fits their sense of past. “This kind of music is from an analog time.”
Though its sound is rooted in the 70s, the two bands that planted the seed of this microgenre were active in the early 80s, though it would take years for either to be recognised. Hailing from Stourbridge, Witchfinder General released two albums that were best known at the time for their cover images, one of them showing a Page 3 model being “murdered” in a churchyard. Only later were they credited as the birth of UK doom metal. Their folk-horror claim lies largely in a song sharing the band name, one inspired by the 1968 horror film starring Vincent Price, extremely loosely based on the life of Matthew Hopkins in the English civil war. “I’m coming to get you / I’m coming to take you away!” howled singer Zeeb Parkes. “You witches are evil, you worship the devil / So listen to what I say!”
They were trying to sound like Sabbath in a world that wanted velocity, guitarist Phil Cope told me in 2020: “Witchfinder tried to keep the music slow and heavy. But it didn’t really work because the majority of people were moving with the times and they liked that fast music, and we got left behind.”
The other original totems, south London’s Pagan Altar, are more obscure – even in their own time. All that existed was one self-released set of demos, which was gradually reissued in various forms, though a whole catalogue of songs written during the band’s initial existence were later recorded for the Mythical & Magical album. Dance of the Druids, had it been released first time around, might have spoiled one of Spın̈al Tap’s most famous songs: “This ritual of the druids has been the saviour of mankind / Unknown to them the price was paid by personal sacrifice.”
But in the absence of much music to hear, word spread of their legend: that they had built their studio on a site where witches were burned in Brockley in south London; occasional hauntings, including one by a woman in black who disappeared through the floor; and that they allegedly recreated satanic rituals onstage. “Being a strange and uncovered relic heightened their appeal, because it felt like you were discovering something arcane,” says Nick Ruskell of metal bible Kerrang! (who also moonlights as Necroskull, singer/guitarist of folk-horror-adjacent doom band Witchsorrow).
It may be those legends that have made Pagan Altar guitarist Alan Jones reluctant to talk, citing bad experiences with the press, until he agreed to answer questions via email.
Their interest in the occult came from their singer, Alan’s dad Terry. “I’d been playing in bands with my dad since I was 11, in 1973,” he writes. “All through the 1970s there was a lot of interest in the occult and folk, and my dad’s lyrics reflected the time.”
Interestingly, as well as metal bands, Jones cites folk acts Steeleye Span, Renaissance and Pentangle, all of whom summoned English mythology. And it ties with something Fenriz of legendary Norwegian black metal band Darkthrone told me in 2021 about the rise of occultism in early 80s metal: “One had it from the 60s; the cauldron was already bubbling with Coven, Black Widow, Black Sabbath. Combine that with a lot of folk-rock that didn’t exactly feel Christian but pagan as hell – yes, I get an anti-Christian vibe from Steeleye Span. There, I’ve said it – and top it off with some Vincent Price movies.” It’s your one-pot recipe.
But that raises the question: given the status of, say, Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief, and its thematic relation to this stuff, why don’t we get more metal covers of folk music?
“It’s funny you mention Liege & Lief,” says Green Lung’s Templar. “My girlfriend’s dad just gave me that record: ‘You’ll like this!’” Templar’s connection to the English past came not from those records, as it had for musicians 30 or more years older. “I grew up in rural Norfolk. There was very little to do in a hamlet of 400 people, and that was good for the imagination. I’d go round secondhand bookshops, looking for books about ufology or folkloric myths and legends. The horror came in at 16, when I started watching Evil Dead and Dawn of the Dead.”
He also credits Julian Cope for spurring interest in the ancient. “He was someone who made me think this stuff was cool as a kid growing up in Norfolk, where you live without a musical context – we didn’t have a Sheffield or a Manchester nearby.”
Why does he think British bands, and English bands in particular, have not embraced folklore fully, given its role in European metal? Well, he says, there’s the fact that some Nazi bands in Europe have co-opted folklore (Green Lung sell anti-Nazi merch), though he, Ruskell and Brown, all make it plain that they’ve seen no sign of that in the UK. “I don’t see an interest in British folk history as having been colonised by Nazis,” Templar says. “If anything, it’s associated with new-agey, travelling people. Of course, you don’t want to be associated with a Reform vision of Britain, but this is more Glastonbury crystal shop.”
There’s also an innately British reason for resisting folklore. “Folk culture in the UK has often been depicted in a very twee way, and there are always going to be moments where it will be cheesy. But you can’t get to the good stuff if you don’t have a bit of bravery around that.”
• Necropolitan by Green Lung is released via Nuclear Blast on 11 September
