Ghost

The Nick Rayns LCR, UEA

Lizz by

19/09/20

Sweden’s huge metal scene has been a thing for some years now, and their latest and most popular export is Ghost. With Papa Emeritus on the mic, and five Nameless Ghouls on instruments, they’re wreathed in tongue-in-cheek Satanic language, melodic rock and total anonymity. Signed in 2010, their third album Meliora won a Grammy and their current EP Popestar has been streamed over 18 million times within just a few months. Ghost are bringing their epic and memorable stage show to the LCR this month so I spoke to the guitar-playing Nameless Ghoul about supporting Iron Maiden on tour, why Scandinavia so loves the heavy and why they chose to cover a Simian Mobile Disco track on their latest EP. Horns up.

The Nameless Ghouls represent the five elements of fire, water, wind, earth and ether. Which one are you and what do you play?

I represent all of them, and most of the time I play guitar.

How would you describe your music? I don’t think I’ve heard anything quite like it before in terms of the richness of its variety.

Hmmm, I don’t know. We play melodic rock music with an image associated with the classic shock-rock era.

How did you get involved in Ghost back in the mid noughties?

I started the band!

Have you all been in other metal bands before Ghost?

Yeah, I mean Ghost has always been an institution where there’s an influx of people coming in and out. We started as a very small project which wasn’t necessarily even a band, it was more of a singular thing, and then when all of a sudden it rose in popularity and we started touring heavily it quickly became evident that we needed various people coming in and out because not everyone is as into heavy touring as much as I am. We have a few newer members at the moment and as the years have gone by we have tried to recruit members who have a lot of touring experience. In the early days we were naively recruiting some people that lacked touring experience and it showed after a while. Nowadays I’m pretty adamant about having people who have spend years and years and years touring because it does matter. We’ve all played different styles of music from rock, pop, metal, punk..

What’s your favourite Ghost track?

It depends. Usually when I’m writing and recording our music I listen a lot to that album we’re making and usually by the time it gets released I’ve stopped listening to it and I rarely go back to it. However I’ve spent some time recently with some new members of the band revisiting some of our older songs as we have to teach them how to play them. Sometimes when I’m doing that I realise that something we did was very clever, or nice, and I think we have a few songs that I would consider better than others. I think Cirece is great – I’m lucky that we managed to do that one.

Scandinavia is well known for being the birthplace of many rock and death metal bands. Why do you think heavy music is so popular in that part of the world?

One of the reasons why a lot of the music that comes from Scandinavia strikes a chord that might not do the same from other reasons is probably because of what is referred to as the ‘melancholy of the north’. Our folk music is very sombre and romantic. You hear a lot of Swedish folk in ABBA and a lot of it in the whole Gothenburg Sound. If you go up north and go to a midsummer’s evening and you have an old fashioned folk music band playing, you’ll probably think it was a nu-metal band because it sounds like that! When that’s transferred into popular music there’s a tonal language there that is somewhat unique. The reason why we’re traditionally so successful in metal is due to a snowball effect – in the early 80’s we had Europe who came from Stockholm – there was John Norum, their guitarist, and he was friends with Yngwie Malmsteen. So everyone around them wanted to become shredding guitar heroes and all of a sudden you have a bunch of really good guitar players. It’s a bit contagious. Bathory were historically very valuable but they didn’t spawn as many other bands as Entombed did. When Entombed really hit it home and became huge there were all those metal bands from Stockholm - Dismember, Grave, Tiamat, all those bands. That in turn led to another wave of bands, and because of all that bands from Sweden have since had a quality stamp. I’m not saying that all Swedish music is of a high quality but it’s been easier for Swedish bands to break through in metal than perhaps, say, Czechoslovakian bands. That means that more 14 year old kids apply themselves more seriously to learning instruments and starting bands, their conviction becomes greater. It has an enormous effect when you have acts like Europe, Entombed, ABBA, Roxette, The Cardigans and Max Martin who have enjoyed such success worldwide. Sometimes you need gate-kicker-inners to start things off, and that in turn creates more talent.

On stage you all wear masks, make up and robes, so no one knows who you are. Does being anonymous make it easier or more difficult for you to have a private life away from the band?

It has been both a blessing and a curse. I pretty much full time work with Ghost almost every day, and spend so much time thinking about it and creating it, both artistically but also practically. My whole being is consumed with Ghost. For some of the people who have been in the band over the years it’s been more of a curse than a blessing, who haven’t spent a lot of time doing Ghost other than being onstage, they’ve wanted to branch out more or be more visible and more married to your persona. My story is quite different from almost everyone else in the band though.

You’ve done some covers of somewhat unexpected songs by ABBA, Echo and the Bunnymen, Simian Mobile Disco and the Eurthymics. How did you come to choose those particular tracks?

Some of them are songs that I have listened to most of my life. I’m an avid FIFA fan and play it a lot, have done for 12 years, and that Simian Mobile Disco song was on the soundtrack of FIFA 07 or something. I always found myself liking that song, if it was on the pause menu or whatever, I really liked it, and that’s where I found it. I always felt the song was a bit unexplored in a way so it was great to cover it.

You’ve released three albums now – are you working on a new one?

Yes, as we speak I’m going through a lot of writing and demoing and planning. That’s going to continue until the summer, and come August we start recording. The new album should be out early next year.

You’re supporting Iron Maiden in North America this summer – that must be a very exciting prospect.

Yeah it’s fantastic. We’ve toured with them previously but most of the time it’s been within a festival or arena context so it’s been a lot of on and off’ where we haven’t actually played together, just us. We’ve been saying for years we’d like to just do a straight, normal tour where it’s just us and them and it’s the same every day because that’s also very nice. I’ve been wanting to do it for some years and now that it’s going to happen I’m very excited.

Norwich is the first date on your Popestar European tour –what can we expect from your show?

Oh if you’ve never seen us before you’re in for something a bit different from most things! It’s even more fun touring now that we have managed to amass a repertoire where we’re not necessarily playing all our songs. In the beginning we played everything – when we had a headline show we struggled because we only had one record out which was 30 minutes long. All we could do was extend some solos and Papa Emeritus could tell some jokes to get our set up to 45 minutes! We had to really scramble to fill the time. But now we struggle to get the set down to one and a half hours. It’s fun.

Will you be playing any songs we’ve never heard before?

No, we don’t do that. We’ve got enough songs to chose from already!

Ghost play the LCR on 24th March. Tickets available from ueatickets.ticketabc.com