#metal interviews

What’s your musical journey been like leading up to your role in Ghost?  What things sort of set you on the path to where you are now?

Well, I started off as a lot of kids that have a musical inclination by listening to either the stereo or the TV and with a guitar-shaped broomstick, and just jumping around screaming “I wanna rock!”  A few years later, I know that we had a piano at home, but I also know we had a piano at my kindergarten, and I was taken away with that probably before I had a guitar.  I know that we had a nylon acoustic there as well that I was sort of fingering on a little bit, but then I started playing guitar when I was seven.

It started off in the usual way.  But I never was in school for it.  I mean, at some point, probably when I was ten, I went to a course at school but it was very rudimentary, and I quit immediately because the teacher said “You’ll surpass what I’m trying to teach everyone here, you have to advance,” because it was so basic, and I never took any other course.  The first thing that I did when I got my electric guitar was basically try to, by ear, play and know all the songs from KISS Alive! and stuff like that. 

I figured out from early on how to sort of bite stuff from the records that I heard.  The only thing that I really remember being as annoying is at that point we didn’t have a CD player.  This was in the 80s, so pretty much everything was still on vinyl, which was cool and all at least when it comes to listening, but having to retune my guitar all the time because the vinyl player was fucking up the tuning with each song on each record was a little difficult.  I remember spending so much time tuning a guitar, whereas when the revolution of CDs came into place it was a little bit easier because you could keep your tuning. 

    You mentioned KISS as an early influence.  Were there other bands along that same vein that worked as a creative catalyst for you, and do you see yourself still tapping into those inspirations even now?

From my home there was a lot of 60s music – just from the parents’ side, whereas there was a lot of contemporary music from the siblings’ side.  Obviously there are a lot of things that came from what was contemporary at that point that have lived through me and the music that we do, but I think there are a few things that have really stuck.  Though I would say that I like a band like Scorpions, for example, which obviously in the mid-80s were a big band and part of that big boom.  “Rock You Like a Hurricane” was on the TV at that point – I think it was like ’84 or something like that. 

No disrespect to Scorpions, though, but there’s a lot of things like that that might not really have stood the test of time in the sense that, even though I really still like playing a record like Entrance or something like that still holds strong, but it’s not as influential as The Beatles or Pink Floyd or Deep Purple, for example. I think that especially Pink Floyd and The Beatles and even The Doors have been bands that have been with me for as long as I can remember, basically, and still I always look back on that as being a constant.  You can put on metal or Strange Days, and you’re like ‘Fuck! This is the cornerstone of music.’ 

    When you look at the band Ghost, specifically, and at how quickly you guys went from a kind of obscurity to considerable popularity and even a brand of sorts, how have you personally seen that growth from the band’s early beginnings to where it is now?

I’ve been so entangled with everything that’s been going on from one angle, so obviously from the inside, and it’s been nonstop basically for four years.  It’s hard sometimes to measure because you can’t really see it, and especially – I mean, we’re so used to touring, and usually even though, and I think I speak for most of us in the band, but you feel a little bit disconnected to the band when you’re not on tour, and not band in terms of the people but the phenomenon. 

Because when you’re out touring, you feel very much like it’s the reward of manual labor.  When you feel that you are physically building upon your creation, or you’re doing your craft, whereas all of a sudden when you’re home, and you have “time off” sometimes you feel disconnected to all of that because you’re not getting the feed that you’re used to.  You’re not getting a crowd to play in front of or anything, and all of a sudden you have to remind yourself that ‘Oh, you don’t have to stress things.  You’re still popular.  You’re still okay.  They’re gonna be there in April! Hopefully!’  Then you have to check the ticket sales. 

I think that, so far, and I don’t think that will ever change.  I really hope not.  I still feel sometimes a little bit surprised and not too certain about our position.  You have to realize things might change.  It might change for the better.  It might change for the worse.  On top of that, I think throughout these years when we’ve been working there are obviously a lot of goals and intentions that right now we are focusing on a lot that are supposed to happen in the future. 

Right now we are thinking a wee bit on the tour that’s coming up.  We’re thinking a lot about the next record.  We’re thinking a lot about the next stage show, and the next album cycle.  So, when the time comes to do that, we’ll probably be thinking about the next album after that.  There’s a lot of time spent not truly being at your current position, which I think is very normal.  It’s very common in creative work. 

    Do you think that the specific kind of career trajectory that Ghost and so many others have had where the time to create essentially gets narrowed with success is a potential obstacle to that original kind of creativity and creative process from the beginning when time was basically all you had?

Obviously, one of our upsides is that we are not one of those bands that sold a shit load of records in the past that’s now declining.  Most bands in the last ten years have experienced that, whereas we have nothing to compare to, so for us it’s just growing.  It has been integral to the creative process that you cannot make any living off selling records nowadays.  Basically, you have to tour all the time, which, for us, we set out immediately even before we started touring heavily that we wanted to tour heavily because we wanted to be an entertainment act. 

We had no intention of making a record that would sell like Adele and just sit back and relax.  It was the intention from the get-go to tour.  What we did not know which, obviously, we learned very quickly was that with six people in the band, having a lot of crew members, having a lot of stuff, and just having a busy touring schedule – you have to invest a shit load of money.  Just to sort of make the ends meet at all, you have to tour a lot.  There are so many people depending on the band nowadays. 

We’re six people in the band, we have between six and eight in the crew, and a slight rotation of a few people because they have other people they’re working with, but some of them are exclusively working with us, so when we have a down time of two months, we’re risking losing crew members, and people get downtime which is not necessarily appreciated by everybody.  There are a lot of elements like that that I know every band is experiencing nowadays.  It’s how you know you’re successful in that you have to keep on touring. 

On the other side you have the public and the audience that expects you to reinvent yourself a lot and frequently.  I’m not saying this in the negative way, but it gets a little bit unnatural.  For example, we are a theatrical band.  We are theatrical.  There’s a show element to it.  Just because some of that and how we are as people in terms of the emotional and just because we tend to have a wee bit of backtracks in our music – there are elements, audio-wise that cannot be reproduced with us just being onstage – that adds a certain element of inflexibility. 

We can’t just improvise songs and throw off the order.  There’s a wee bit of thought into the setlist and stuff.  We try to, from one tour to the other, mix it up a little bit, because people who come and see us several times, we don’t want them to get bored, but still.  It’s gonna basically be the same.  At least we’re gonna play the same eighteen songs because those are our songs.  I think that makes the band, in general, come off as slightly desperate in the sense that you need to tour, tour, tour, record, tour, tour, tour, record – which isn’t new.  It’s been that way forever but nowadays I think it’s even more common.  We’re not estranged to that.  Our year basically looks like that. 

We’re gonna tour until September, and then we’re gonna go into the studio, and then we’ll have a new record out in early 2015, and then we’ll go to the next thing.  That’s what really makes us non-bitter, though, I think.  We’re glad of our position, and that we’re still taking a step further which each release, so far.  The fanbase is growing, and we’re fucking poised.  We’re having a blast.  I think there’s a lot of bands that have been doing that for fifteen or twenty years that feel like it’s a chore having to do a new album in order to just maintain what you have. 

    You mentioned being an “entertainment band,” Ghost has been a kind of divisive band for metal fans especially who are either writing you guys off as being solely a gimmick and then others who are totally behind the theatrics and see you guys as a creative force.  How does Ghost as a band draw that dividing line between the theatrical and the raw creativity where you’re doing something compelling and creatively singular?

Emotionally, I feel inside that I know exactly what the difference is.  It’s hard when you translate it into actual words.  There’s always pits you fall into rhetorically.  We are an entertainment act, meaning that compared to a non-commercial, Orthodox religious black metal band that doesn’t perform live at all and just do it for the pure, religious expression – we might come off as just a gimmicky, jokish fun project, and I get that.  I come from the underground. I know the difference between apples and oranges. However, that doesn’t mean that everything we say or everything we’re doing for the sake of the art is just bogus that we laugh about. 

We do things tongue-in-cheek because the bottom-line is: we just like having fun as much as everybody else.  We have found a way to fluently, with our gimmick and without getting stuck with the idea of what we’re supposed to be, which I think a lot of people in bands in general who’ve built up an image or a gimmick around themselves or around their actual persons tend to get stuck because everybody expects them to be this sad poetry reading, chain smoking guy in the back of the library.  That’s the image that you have if you are Nick Cave or whatever.  You have to be Nick Cave.  You have people expecting you to be that. 

Obviously with our anonymity aspect as well, we have the luxury of stepping in and out of that image.  But our image that we have painted up and that we’re stepping into our hour and a half every other day on tour, we’ve found a way to make it fluent where the music is still fluently coming from our emotional and philosophical cores as members.  I feel no authenticity problems with what we’re doing, because I know that the source is pure. 

      Going along with that, how have you seen that definition of “extreme” or what people deem as shocking change just over the last two decades, and especially in an age where the absorption of information and imagery is almost overwhelming in the social media age?

First of all, I think that we are definitely a product of modern day social media.  Yes.  We were one of those bands that sort of made it on MySpace.  Possibly one of the last bands, because I think that when they changed the format and went tits up it completely destroyed a perfect platform for spreading your music where we were very much a living, breathing example of a band that completely made our at least first six months on MySpace. 

I come from a sort of tape trading background where you made demos and sent them out, and that worked as well, but it was very tedious.  There was an element of humanity, or it was a more human world where you actually had to do something physical in order to await a result.  And it could take a lot of time.  It could take forever.  Most of the time, two weeks after that you got a physical shipment sent to you that explained what they thought about your tape.  I was very excited about that when I was young. 

I was obviously even more excited about breaking this band when it happened online, because it happened so quickly.  It’s overwhelming how quick and how immediate you can get a response to your creations nowadays.  Especially as we set out very early on that we wanted to take some time before we announced the band and before we sent off the recording.  We waited until a very good point and time, and then the band just started fucking mail-bombing people overnight.  People liked what they heard, and there was a domino effect.