Quotes from Tobias Forge

My first teacher... was extremely strict, mean, and deeply religious.

If you come in like a typical modern drummer who is used to playing only with tricks and double kick and, like, big, big, big, fast rolls, but you can't play a swinging shuffle, then you can't play in Ghost whatsoever.

A band which plays songs such as 'Death Knell' or 'Prime Mover' can't just stand on the stage with a shirt and jeans-jacket. It must be more awesome than that.

As long as I've been doing Ghost, at least, I've been very keen on maintaining not necessarily an anonymity but a low profile. But on the other hand, I spent 25 years not doing Ghost, where, 20 of those years, I wanted to be nothing but a famous rock musician.

Sometimes I just wish I played in a band like Foo Fighters.

Even if people would know who we are, or you could click on a Wikipedia page saying my date of birth, it does not necessarily mean that I have to go out on social media and tell you where I'm eating.

Not only did we read a lot at home, we also watched a lot of films. So I had already seen a lot of films that were about the crucifixion and the temptation of Christ, like Bible history and the Ten Commandments - stuff like that.

I constantly work with material that could be two years old, five years old, ten years old, as well as new things.

The original idea of being anonymous - it was a great, naive idea on paper in 2008, not knowing to what degree we'd be touring or to what extent this was going to be a professional operation. That regimen is very hard to live by. What I hadn't foreseen was the fans and their willingness to embrace that and play along.

My name is Tobias Forge and I'm the man behind the mask in Ghost.

Ghost has always been about make-believe.

With Ghost, I never really foresaw that it was going to take off the way it did.

I was 29 when we sort of broke through with Ghost.

I've liked Kiss from when I was three years old. I've seen them, the real deal, with all the original members when they came back in '96 and all that, and that's fine.

I definitely believe that tormenting other people because of the Bible and for that to be - for lack of a better word, Gospel... I think that is not very nice.

Artistically, or just performance-wise, I love playing arenas. I think that is my favorite form, because it's big enough to feel like a big, grand show.

I'm an okay drummer, I'm an okay bass player, I'm an okay keyboardist, and I'm a quite good guitar player.

I'm a big fan of a lot of prog music. As a record collector as well, I won't throw anybody or any band under the bus, but a lot of the records are fun to collect, are not necessarily very good. There are a lot of prog bands out there that it's a really cool record, but it's, like, not really there.

Even the biggest bands - and I hate to break the magic - but even the band that sold out 90,000 tickets in your football stadium, they might come back two years later and do an arena. It still feels huge, but there's a difference - there's a big difference. And there's a big difference playing a 30,000-seat stadium and a 90,000.

I enjoy the idea of being able to sort of flip-flop between being recognized and not being recognized.

I like the fact that my work in Ghost is famous, and people know it, and we have our crowd. But I am not as antsy about getting recognized on the street as I might have once been.

If you ever want to play bigger places, you need to have records that sound like you're playing in big places.

More than often, what you see, or what we've been able to recreate, has usually been a tampered-with version of what I have in my head, because the original idea has always been bigger. Every time I am in the mode of creating a show, there's always some level of gravity that comes in play, either of a monetary sort, or there's a space issue.

When you have a fruitful relationship with someone, and you've both chosen to work together, then it can spawn really good things.