Ghost's conceptual mastermind and band leader Tobias Forge has admitted that he feared that his dream of becoming a professional musician had passed him by in the mid Noughties as he began working on the occcult metal project.
In a new interview with NME.com, the 44-year-old musician reveals that, having played in bands since his teens, by 2004 he was "struggling" with the gnawing realisation that he had missed whatever "wave" was supposed to bear him towards a career in music.
Having been an active participant in Sweden's underground metal scene since his mid-teens, first promoting shows in and around his hometown, Linköping, then playing guitar in death metal bands Superior and Repugnant, before graduating to fronting pop rock band Subvision, Forge was never expecting to become a global rock superstar. But he harboured hopes and dreams that sustaining a living as a professional musician might have been within his capabilities. By 2004, however, as The Strokes emerged as the de facto leaders of a NME-endorsed new wave of punky garage/indie bands - see also The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Kings of Leon, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and more - Forge was unable to escape black thoughts that he was never going to get a break in the industry, and that he should relinquish his dreams.
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"I was moving around in underground circles for most of my adolescence," he tells journalist Liberty Dunworth, "and even in underground circles, obviously there's a difference between being completely unknown and being successful, even if you're a death metal band. And, of course, I've always wanted to be as 'efficient' and successful as possible: when I was playing underground death metal it wasn't like I didn't want to succeed. I wanted to succeed, I wanted to be on a real label, wanted to be out touring.
"For a long time I was under the belief that I was going to be a guitar player only, a [Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist] John Frusciante, a guitar player behind a singer who also sings great harmonies. But in the 2000s -and NME readers will know this very well - when I was in my 20s, there was this huge rock wave, The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, just rock all over the place, and I thought, Okay, this might be something. But I learned very quickly that if you see the wave, you've missed it, so I was sort of struggling with that, like, Hmmm, how do I find my place? In 2004 [being in a band] it was all about short hair, and pretending you didn't really want to play music, and I just woke up looking like this - not true, they made an effort - and [in Subvision] we had a little bit too long hair, we were a bit too metal, not indie enough, so that was like a struggle.
"I was constantly writing songs for that [band] and this project called Ghost," he continues. "From being a teenager, and a 20-something, constantly available for the big career - single, no job, just waiting for the big break - I had slowly transgressed into someone who was actually a partner and had two children. And somewhere there, depending on who you ask, friends of mine were like, 'Just give up on that fucking dream, it's not happening'. No-one really told me that, but I felt at a certain point that I probably will not be a a musician, and if I'm going to live without having realised my dream, I need to have a hobby, I need to have some sort of outlet for for my creativity...
"And out of all the things that I was working on," he says, "Ghost was definitely the one thing that I felt like, if I'm going to do one thing for five per cent of my life I want to do that. Everything else was sort of... not really worth the attention, whereas this I understood and and I think that part of that was because it was it was wrapped in another face, it was literally like someone else. This box with this horror wrapping was containing basically everything that I am interested in: it's rock music, metal, AOR, a vocals, heavy guitars, horror, occult imagery... everything I like, a perfect hobby. So very spare hour I have, I'm going to put on that, and hopefully that can amount to something that will satisfy my creative needs."
As we all know, Ghost became infinitely more than that. The band's new albnum, Skeletá, the follow-up to 2022's hugely successful Impera, is set for release on April 25 via Loma Vista, and the Swedish band will begin a world tour around the same time, with Forge 'reborn' as their 'brand new' frontman, Papa V Perpetua.
Watch Tobias Forge's NME.com interview in full below.
