Just a quick translation of an interview from this month’s MH. Tobias talks about his inspirations, nostalgia, basically confirms that the ghouls will stay for the next cycle (!!!), and casually drops a ton of encyclopaedic knowledge of music as usual. Enjoy!

Asked about your biggest inspirations, you most often point to the 80s, but “Seven Inches of Satanic Panic” is quite clearly a tribute to an even earlier decade. Are the 60s another great fascination of yours, or did you just want to immerse yourself in the aesthetics of an era from which you haven’t yet drawn much inspiration?

A lot of my inspiration comes from the 1960s, actually. Before I became interested in metal music, I was fascinated by bands from the 60s. When I first started playing the guitar, my favourite albums were the first two Pink Floyd records – “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and “A Saucerful of Secrets”. I was seven or eight years old, and I would sit in my room for hours trying to play along to them. I was absolutely enamoured by all things 60s. Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and The Doors have always had a great influence on my music, so my interest in that era isn’t anything new, not at all. The thing is, when I create music for Ghost, I always try to mix different influences. And I like to impose imaginary tasks on myself, like: okay, now you’re a musician from 1960s, but you’re recording an album a decade or two later. I think I’ve always had a very archaeological approach to writing music. I like to take known components and put them together to create new combinations – sort of like a chef who combines unusual flavours to create a completely new dish.

Looking at Ghost’s development so far, it’s clear that it’s not a typical, predictable evolution. The way it usually works is that one album signals a particular trope and then the next one follows it, and so on, but with Ghost each album is a completely different story.

I hope it’s not a typical evolution. And I hope that people don’t know what to expect from each new album. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but generally rock history shows that if you want to create something out of the ordinary, then this idea to surprise your listeners is basically a necessary factor. I am aware that over the years, when the genre developed and finally established itself, some of the audience became very puritanic, very conservative – in the traditional understanding of the word – and traditional conservatism is afraid of anything that has not been already thoroughly described and reworked. It’s understandable that a band like mine may seem bizarre to some people, that they may reject it. It doesn’t bother me. I think that’s how careers of Pink Floyd, Beatles, Metallica and Queen were formed. Many bands that I love and that we see today as classics never remained on a single, linear path of development, and instead tried again and again to do something completely new; to write songs they didn’t yet have in their discography. I try to follow a similar path. I always want to make an album that I haven’t made before. I like to believe that the listeners have no idea what to expect next from Ghost. And I never want to reach the point where I would become predictable as a composer.

I know you want to go into the studio early next year to start recording the successor to Prequelle. Do you already have a vision in your head of how this new album should sound?

You could say that, yes. In the coming months I plan on doing it full-time. With each new album I try to keep the full excitement of the creation process. In my head, January is just around the corner and I really cannot wait to get into the studio and start working on the new material! It’s never “just another boring day at work” for me.

Do you think that the specificity of the current Ghost concert line-up – with keyboard players and a few vocalists responsible for the choirs – may somehow influence the final shape of the new material?

In a way, it can. At the moment I have a line-up that is quite stable – of all the previous Ghost line-ups, this band remained unchanged the longest. It’s also the first time that an unchanged line-up survived the whole concert cycle of an album. I certainly don’t intend to make any changes to something that works so well. I am aware of what this line-up is capable of and I will certainly use this knowledge to write a new album. I know the musicians, I know what I can write and how it will be played live later. It’s a big change compared to the past, when the situation wasn’t as stable. I had to rearrange a lot of motifs and adapt them to the limitations of the performers at the time, so my original vision was compulsorily transformed. And then there was another issue: once, when there were fewer musicians on stage, in order for Ghost to sound as good as I would like it to, we had to sometimes resort to using playback and backing tracks. Now we are able to reproduce the original sound from the album much more faithfully, without such efforts, just by relying on the musicians who are present on the stage. I think it’s a change for the better. I won’t say that it’s easy to play all the motifs from the albums now, but it’s definitely easier than in the past. It sounds fuller, more organic. I have always strived for such a situation. Back in the day, I couldn’t afford to involve additional musicians, it was simply impossible. But now I can. So, to answer your questions - yes. The awareness of what we can do live in this line-up certainly influences the way I think about new Ghost music.

You said in one of the interviews that you wanted to create nostalgia among listeners of Ghost. Looking at the whole, quite retrospective, metal environment – do you actually think that nostalgia will do any good here?

Yes and no. I can tell you about my own perspective: I’m a fan of a lot of old things. I love old movies, old music, old art in general and especially everything that is or was part of pop culture. I regret to say that, but I’m way more excited about old things, the melodies of the past than any kind of contemporary art. I believe, however, that the future should be managed with new things, not old ones. The future of rock'n'roll isn’t the old bands, it’s the new ones. Those who will come should of course be aware of the past, but they shouldn’t be blindly following it. I think that in five or ten years we will see an influx of a new wave of rock bands. Everything is repeated in cycles. And I have an impression that these bands of the next wave will not be bands whose names we already know at the moment.

However, what I said about nostalgia in the context of Ghost is not equal to the usual longing for the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s. I was thinking more about the feeling that particular eras in the history of the band, which are limited in time, can create. I want to instigate a desire in listeners to participate in the current era in real time, here and now. To give them a feeling of a certain exclusivity, to make them think that all this is worth experiencing here and now. Because, of course, the albums will remain here forever and you will be able to come back to them after a while, but it won’t be the same experience anymore. This gives rise to nostalgia – it creates memories in those who participated in the cycle of a given album, and longing for the unknown in those who did not follow our actions at that moment. Everything we do as Ghost is very well thought out, our actions within one era are logically connected; each album is a separate whole, and there will never be another one like it. This creates nostalgia and a sense of exclusivity. Of course, it’s not like we’re particularly innovative in our approach. Generally, people today tend to create nostalgia in their heads, even if it concerns things that appeared in pop culture relatively recently. It’s just: either you were there and saw the birth of some phenomenon with your own eyes, or you’re late and you experience it second-hand, and it’s just not the same.

I’ll quote one more thing you said: “The first few albums define the artist.” How does it look from your perspective – is Ghost still at its defining stage, or has it reached a new level?

I wouldn’t see any point in continuing with Ghost if I thought the best is already behind us. I believe I haven’t recorded my best album yet and I hope that this feeling will stay with me for as long as possible. Many of my favourite bands have recorded more than a few albums that "defined” their identity. But there are also bands which defined themselves at the very beginning of their careers and then nothing they did later on could match their first albums. For example, in the area of extreme metal, I have favourite bands who produced absolutely amazing debuts, or maybe the first two recordings, and then it all went downhill. It’s a bit different with classical rock, there are more examples of bands reinventing themselves many years after the debut. “Division Bell” is a great recording and was created at a very advanced stage of the band’s career. “The Wall” is also great. “Brave New World" is a fantastic album in my opinion, and yet both earlier and later Iron Maiden albums are not even a fraction as good as that one. U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” or Green Day’s “American Idiot” are also very good albums. I strongly believe that it is possible to write good stuff even at an advanced stage of one’s career. Sometimes it even happens that a band gets better with time. I hardly ever go back to the first four Red Hot Chili Peppers albums, because I think they only found the right formula on “Blood Sugar Sex Magick”. Before that, their music was just funky chaos, it was disorganized and devoid of any leading idea. The earlier albums were okay, but it was “Blood Sugar Sex Magick” and “Californication” that created history. I would like to think that you can record great albums at any time, and that it’s not only this initial stage of the band’s activity that is important and defining. Of course, as a rule, bands start to release less brilliant things over time, but rules were made to be broken! It’s not healthy to think that the best thing you can do was already done. You should always try to make the best possible album… what the end result will be is another story, though. But I don’t think anybody sits down to make a record with thinking “okay, and now I’m going to write a completely average material”. (laughs)

As I mentioned before, looking at the discography of Ghost so far, it is impossible to find two similar albums, or two that somehow refer to each other. Do you think that it is possible to maintain such a state of affairs for, for example, several dozen years of the band’s activity? I’m talking about this rare case of evolution where each new record brings something new and the artist never resorts to the cliches about “returning to one’s roots”.

Okay, but the term “returning to one’s roots” doesn’t have to mean doing the same things that you did in the past. I’ll use the cook metaphor again - many different dishes can be made from the same ingredients. Each album, each song can be approached with different assumptions, with a desire to do something new. When you play in a rock band, you are a bit limited by aesthetics and means: there are only guitars, bass, drums, possibly keyboards, or something that imitates the sound of these instruments. So everything is a matter of proportion, moving between “much” and “little”. Look at the song “Because” by the Beatles: there is a lot of vocals and very little instrumentation. If I thought about it for a moment, I could give you a list of artists who have recorded like 10 very good albums. Definitely Bowie, definitely Pink Floyd. On the other hand, I’m aware that nothing lasts forever. Everything has to end someday. That doesn’t mean, however, that a band goes from top to the bottom in one moment. It’s a constant evolution, a fluctuation of the creative form. I think that as a creator, if you want to remain eternal and unchangeable, you absolutely do not do yourself a favour. It’s not good if you don’t have the desire for change and development in you. It is understandable that when you are in the right moment of your career, you would like it to last forever, but it doesn’t work that way. Anyway, it’s important not to think too much about how your actions will be perceived by the audience. Sooner or later everyone gets into a creative hole. If you’re lucky, and if you make it to that point, you’ll get a chance to make amends. Everything comes and goes in cycles. Again, look at Iron Maiden. In 1996 it wasn’t a big band. They played in clubs and weren’t seen as this big, classic name. In 2000 they were great again, and today they are bigger than ever. Red Hot Chili Peppers were also going through their crises in the 90s, and today they are one of the biggest rock bands in the world. I give you names of these big bands, because on their example you can clearly see how you can turn over a new leaf. Before the release of “American Idiot” Green Day supported Blink 182. Do you think it will ever happen again? That they’ll be supporting Blink 182 again? Fuck no!