It’s impossible to imagine Ghost without Tobias Forge’s voice powering their songs.
The Swedish musician has steered the band from their beginnings as an occult underground metal outfit at the turn of the 2010s to the arena-filling superstars they are today.
But things could have worked out very differently if it weren’t for a missed MySpace message.
The seeds for Ghost were sewed in the late 2000s, when Tobias and bassist Gustaf Lindström entered a studio in Stockholm to record demos of three songs Tobias had written, Prime Mover, Stand By Him and Death Knell.
“I think that was the moment where we knew that this sounded very peculiar,” Tobias told Metal Hammer in 2020. “If we liked it, we knew other people would too.”
But while he might have liked the songs he’d written, he wasn’t that interested in singing them himself. “I was always a big fan of Slash and Keith Richards,” he says. “I wanted to be the cool guitar player rather than the singer.”
Tobias’ plan was to enlist another, more established vocalist to sing the songs he had written
He had three people in mind: former Yngwie Malmsteen singer Mats Levén, Grand Magus’ Janne ‘JB’ Christoffersson, and Messiah Marcolin, former frontman of Swedish doom pioneers Candlemass.
Tobias approached all three via MySpace, but none bit – and in at least one case, never received the message until much later.
In 2020, Messiah Marcolin spoke to Metal Hammer about this near miss, revealing what had really happened.
“I used to get loads of requests on MySpace from bands wanting me to sing on their albums,” Messiah told Hammer, “but when MySpace kind of died, I stopped looking at it.”
Messiah picked up Ghost’s 2010 debut album Opus Eponymous after it was released, having heard that it was partly inspired by Mercyful Fate, a band he loved.
Around the same time, he happened to check his MySpace page for the first time in a while.
“And there I found a message from Ghost asking me if I would consider singing on their first album,” he says.
Shortly afterwards, Ghost played a show in Stockholm, and Messiah visited the band backstage.
“We became friends and have shared many a glass of Amarone red wine over the years,” said Messiah. “I remember telling Tobias when they played a small festival in Sweden called Muskelrock that I thought they have the potential to become a really big band. He said, ‘Do you really think so?’”
Despite the missed opportunity, Messiah insisted he was a fan of Ghost and Opus Eponymous, the album he could have sung on if he’d checked his messages. “I really liked it, still do,” he said. “It’s great!”
And Ghost themselves? After drawing a blank on other singers, Tobias realised that if he wanted the job doing, he would have to do it himself.
Or almost himself - in his head, this project would be fronted by a ghoulish figure in papal robes and make-up, a kind of Satanic anti-pope named Papa Emeritus.
“It was timing, it was ambition, it was a little bit of desperation,” Tobias told Metal Hammer. “On the other hand, I had been preparing all my life for it.”
