Green Lung Live: Arts Club, Liverpool 15-05-24

I don’t do live reviews, so I will keep it short.

Green Lung’s first ever gig in Liverpool was a packed to the gills Arts Club* which was absolutely fizzing way before they set foot on stage. As the band set up, a cheer goes up as they unveil ‘The Dorset Ooser’** at the back of the stage and struggle slightly to fit the left-hand horn on, I just find myself overwhelmed by love for the band, everyone there and metal in general, with all its power and knowingly naff pantomime elements.

When Green Lung hit the stage proper and rev into ‘Hunters In The Sky’ it is a moment of pure communal magic. The band seem delighted at their absolutely fervent reception somewhere they had never played before and play it hard and fast. We get pretty much all of This Heathen Land tonight, including the first time ever the band had played ‘The Ancient Ways’ live, most of Woodland Rites too, as well as the best cuts from Black Harvest.

Seeing them live again I really appreciate just how complex some of their music is, no wonder guitarist Scott Black barely moves all night. The musicianship is excellent and as well as being in very good voice, Tom Templar is a fun, engaging frontman. I am also struck by how essential John Wright’s organ playing is to the overall sound.

What to say readers? that I woke up with a really sore neck this morning from headbanging tells its own story. Green Lung have so many great tunes to play us, throwing in great changes of pace like ‘Song Of The Stones’ where bassist Joseph Ghast gives us a good turn on vocals and percussion.

The highlights? there is the inevitable closer ‘Let The Devil In’ which we have to earn by chanting ‘Hail Satan!’ for the band, ‘Forest Church’ is mighty, ‘One For Sorrow’ is absolutely towering live, as are ‘Reaper’s Scythe’ and ‘Graveyard Sun’. The biggest highlight for me though is just to be present at such a joyous, vibrant metal gig by a great British band, to savour that communal feeling is, oddly for an antisocial fiend like me, almost intoxicating once in a while.

Green Lung are superb live, I would go see them again in a heartbeat. You really should go to a service at that forest church:

Do you feel a presence
Among the stone and moss?
Are you in procession?
All praise to Behemoth

As I step out of the venue with my mates, my Green Lung T-shirt drenched with sweat (not all my own) and I get that incredible feeing of the night air hitting me and spreading electric coldness over my skin, I think to myself ‘I don’t do live reviews’, then I just open up and let the devil in.

1232 Down (still).

*a venue I’d weirdly never been to before, it was a brilliant space too, absolutely superb. My mate Andy remembers seeing Generation X there in the days when Billy Idol had to set up his own gear.

**a 19th century wooden mask/figurehead used in fertility rituals in said rural English county, which the band have adopted.