Scott Black spent his childhood immersed in the myths of the English countryside. The Green Lung guitarist grew up in rural Devon and used to pass the time playing with his friends in a disused quarry. Back at home, he’d get told that the quarry was stalked by a woodwose: a hair-coated wild man straight from Arthurian fables. And this wasn’t just a bedtime story that grown-ups invented for children’s ears, either.
“Even the old blokes at the pub that your dad would hang out with used to talk about it,” the musician remembers on a video call with Prog, on which he’s joined by lead singer Tom Templar. “Growing up very close to Dartmoor, before the internet, all of those legends seemed very plausible.”
Since Green Lung formed in 2017, they’ve presented a distinctly folklore-inspired take on classic rock. Their full-length debut, Woodland Rites, juxtaposed the riffing of Black Sabbath, who formed amid the smog of industrial Birmingham, against lyrics about forest rituals and witches’ covens. Their 2021 follow-up, Black Harvest, was self-categorised as the soundtrack to the folk-horror film inside the band’s heads, and now This Heathen Land pushes the five-piece both deeper into the countryside and farther from comparison to any singular band before them.
This story is from the Issue 145 edition of Prog.
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This story is from the Issue 145 edition of Prog.
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