Green Lung’s Tom Templar: The 10 songs that changed my life

After London's Masters Of The Riff festival earlier this year, Tom Templar found himself, absolutely refreshed, sitting in a supermarket car park with the vehicle's stereo blasting out Manowar until the sun came up. Clearly, we are dealing with a man who takes music, especially metal, with a seriousness that comes around rarely.

So, we sat down with Green Lung's shamanistic singer to get a bit deeper into the music of his life. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of metal. Although, as we shall see, he isn't all that enamoured of all metal...

"This was the first song I ever got truly obsessed with. It's a Beach Boys-esque song about a guy who goes around Dead Man's Curve and crashes his car and dies. I really remember me, my mum and my dad went on a seaside holiday on the North Norfolk coast and we got this cassette called Hits Of The ’60s, which had a bunch of stuff on that got into my subconscious in a big way, like The Ronettes and The Crystals and that kind of stuff.

"I think this song's really melodramatic. You've got a real storyline, which I love. I can't write a song that doesn't have a story. It's bleak as fuck, but it's also got loads of harmonies. I love the 'death disc' thing, where teenage pop stars are doing really bleak songs about death, like Tell Laura I Love Her by Ray Peterson, or Leader Of The Pack. And it's short – in two-and-a-half minutes you have a whole story that establishes love, tragedy, everything, where Bob Dylan or someone would take seven or eight verses to do all that."

"I went to a rural school where everyone was obsessed with sports, but I was skipping that to play doom metal in the drum shed. I remember that Electric Wizard album [Witchcult Today] came out when I was just starting to do metal in a band, and it felt like the coolest album ever. It's very melodic, but also bleak and fucking heavy as fuck, and druggie and weird and sexy. It was like a gateway drug album, it was the one where I was like, 'Oh, I can be a musician. This is a world that I can relate to,' and I'm still in that world. I could have gone and listened to Korn and been a nu-metal kid, but I got sucked in by Electric Wizard. I felt like, 'That's my particular brand.'"

"I'm a terrible musician. I was always a singer, just singing along. And I still can't read music. The first band I had when I was a teenager was called The Marones, a Ramones tribute. I think we did one rehearsal and quit. I was the only one who actually got the Ramones, the bassist and the drummer liked David Gray or something. It didn't last long. We were tackling the first record, and we sucked hard. Sadly, The Marones were not destined for big things in the rural North Norfolk music scene."

"The cool answer would be something by Type O Negative but I didn't get into them until I was an adult. I used to put the song Love Kills by the Australian garage rock band Radio Birdman on mixtapes for girls. But this is probably the one. It bangs, and back then HIM were the band all the girls liked. Importantly, it also sounds like Black Sabbath and Type O Negative, which is legitimately cool.

"The vibe of putting this on a mixtape in 2002 was like, 'I'm an interesting guy, I'm smoking a Galois cigarette, wearing a turtleneck.' I wasn't cool enough to like actual Nick Cave-ass music. This is the lunchbox version of Nick Cave, but it's still sexy, and if I saw HIM now I'd still be well into it."

"I believe Daniel P. Carter played it in 2019 on the Rock Show. He also did a nice mention in Kerrang!. That was the first moment where we were like, 'What the fuck?' It's really hard to explain to people how fucking dumpster-arse Green Lung was at the time. We were playing The New Cross Inn at 3pm to five people. I remember playing a show and a dog came in from the street and climbed onstage. So having the radio play and being written about in Kerrang! was a huge game-changer. It was a DIY release, no press strategy, it just felt like we were nothing. But that was like, 'Oh, wow. Someone who really knows their shit likes us!'"

"Manowar are a really good acid test for me, because it's the way to tell a metal hipster from a true metal person. If you like Manowar, for me, you're in the club, because it's genuinely off-putting to anyone normal. Every time I put this on I feel like a king. I can take on the world. It's oddly emotional. It's like a Broadway musical, but every time I hear it, I literally feel like I'm eight-foot tall, holding a huge sword. It takes me back to that childhood love of metal, when you feel like it's so empowering, that idea that metal makes us strong. No-one normal in my life would listen to this, but it works on me. It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, but I love it."

"This is on our demo. I've been a bit of a coward choosing this. What I'd change is being able to sing, and being able to record a piece of music. This sounds like it's been recorded in a dumpster.

"I joined Green Lung in March 2017, we recorded the demo in June 2017, and I didn't really know what I was doing. In my mind, my vocal now is Ozzy, Zeeb Parkes from Witchfinder General, Bobby Liebling from Pentagram, in that classic doom psyche. When we first started, I was more of a traditional stoner rock vocal, much deeper. If I went back, I do this in the voice that I've got now, it would sound totally different. It's still a good song, and I'm sure three people would want to hear it live."

"It's a song on Black Harvest that isn't that well listened to, according to Spotify. It's not a big one. But every time we play it live, it changes the set. It's got really good moments, a sense of pace, it goes through the gears, and it has this big, screamed, high vocal in the middle. Every time we do it, it changes something. This and Hunters In The Sky, weirdly, are the two songs that inject pure energy into a set. You can drop them and people will be like, 'Fuck yeah.' And also, I love it when a song you record maybe isn't the nailed-on version."

"I'll try to be diplomatic here, but I hate out-and-out irony in metal. I've been on too many festival bills where the main stage is full of gimmick bands and joke bands. The thing is, I get it – you're a jobbing musician trying to pay the bills, and it's easy to dress up like a pirate or a hair metal band. It just really depresses me that so much well-crafted up and coming metal is overlooked in favour of this kind of stuff.

"Let me put it in pro wrestling terms. In early-’90s WWE, there was an egg at the side of the stage for a few shows. Everyone was like, 'What's in the egg?' It hatched at the Thanksgiving Survivor Series, and it was just a guy in a turkey costume called The Gobbledy Gooker, and everybody booed. He disappeared soon afterward, because everyone knew it was a shitty, one-note gimmick.

"Gimmicks can absolutely work in metal – a lot of the best bands take a thematic approach – but you really have to believe in that theme, and you have to write great songs around it. For me, bands like Manowar or King Diamond are the equivalents of Mankind and the Undertaker, but bands like Alestorm and Steel Panther are the Gobbledy Gooker. And the Gobbledy Gooker shouldn't be getting booked for the main event."

"Fuck yeah. Just imagine your coffin is being slowly lowered into a cremator. There's fire, and your mum's crying or whatever, and then suddenly: 'Oooooh, disco supernova! Do the martian bossanova! Can ya dig it? Let's groove, sonic motherfucker!' It'd be amazing. I love Cathedral, I think they're totally underrated at the moment, they're gone but people need to talk about them more. This song was just on an EP, but it's a definite 10 out of 10."

Green Lung play at Bloodstock on August 9, and have just announced dates for 2025.

Read this next:

• Green Lung: “None of this stuff feels like we’re gunning for it – it just happens because we f*cking love it”
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• King Diamond: "If there is a hell and I go there who cares? I've already faced it"