In an interview with Revolver Magazine, GHOST mainman Tobias Forge spoke about how he feels now when the band is no longer anonymous.
He said: “The original idea of being anonymous – it was a great, naive idea on paper in 2008, not knowing to what degree we’d be touring or to what extent this was going to be a professional operation.
“That regimen is very hard to live by. What I hadn’t foreseen was the fans and their willingness to embrace that and play along. [Laughs] I guess that’s the whole thing with showbiz and magic tricks: It’s like you have a silent agreement with your audience.
“Now, I feel like this has already become more of an entity on its own. As long as I don’t go onstage completely normal and then jump into character onstage, I assume that most fans would be able to accept me as the creator. I can comment on the work the same way a director would on his movie.”
Asked if this means he’s not interested in changing the band’s image, Tobias replied: “No, no, no. The exact opposite, actually. The plan is for it to be even more theatrical and even more dressed up.”
Forge then talked about KISS being unmasked way back in the day, saying:
“Growing up being a KISS fan, I definitely didn’t have a problem with it [the unmasking]. Granted, I was so little and I basically started liking KISS just when they had taken their masks off.
“When I was five years old, in my room I had KISS posters all over the place and it was masked and unmasked. I had the poster with Paul Stanley touching his nipple and they looked like this horrendous aerobics masquerade. I didn’t think anything about it.
“Why would GHOST be any different than any other band? Why would this be so strange that any knowledge about its true identity would tarnish it to the point where you cannot like it anymore?”
Tobias also spoke about the new album:
“It is loosely themed around the concept of death and doom. It’s a themed album around medieval times, but it’s definitely clinging onto a lot of very current things. The Black Death [plague] is a great example of a turning point for a whole civilization. Complete villages were annihilated. Most people knew very little, so all of it was God or the Devil — and about their faith being questioned: Why are we being stricken down by this great scourge? It must be because of our not fearing God enough and all this superstitious bulls**t.
“There’s a lot that you would recognize today in online mannerisms,” he continued. “In many ways, we’ve gone back a few steps because now it’s closer to how it was back in the old days when people were standing at the square and all of a sudden, it’s like in Monty Python‘s ‘Life Of Brian’: ‘Stone him! Ra! Ra! Ra!’ Public trials are very unsupervised and extremely swift and speak to the most primordial parts of us.”
