Tobias Forge has revealed that there has been a plan since the beginning for someone else to be the lead singer of Ghost, and that he could still follow through with this plan. He told 101WKQX, as transcribed by Ultimate-Guitar.
“In 2006 and onwards, when Ghost sort of began to appear in my head, my intention was to just play the guitar. I wanted to write everything and do backups on the vocals, I just wanted to be the guitar player.”
He was asked if it’s “weird” to never play the songs he created for the band live.
“In a way. It’s not weird because now obviously I’m conditioned into being this singer guy, but if I had my way – and definitely in an alternative future if whatever happens – I could definitely picture myself sort of getting someone else to sing and just play the guitar.”
“I love playing those songs myself. Obviously, I don’t do it very often, and of course, the more time I spent jumping around doing other things, the less I play guitar.
“It’s a little bit of a cycle where every time I come home, I play a little bit more and then I go on the road, and I play a little bit less, and then as soon as I go into the studio again, I have to really, really, like, get my chops up again.”
Forge also discussed starting Ghost with the riff for “Stand By Him.”
“2006, at the time, my own band was called Subvision. I was, like, the sole music writer, the singer and the guitar player, and I don’t know how to describe it…
“My intention with that band was to be some sort of mixture between… I liked a lot of, like, old New York bands at the time; like, Blondie, stuff like that. So, if Dead Boys was a bit more musical – no offense against the Dead Boys, I love Dead Boys – but I wanted them to be a little more, like, fine-tuned, a little bit more like Television.
“But I wanted Television to be more like Dead Boys, but sort of looking like Guns N’ Roses in 1987. So I wanted it to be, like, some sort of power-punk-pop band on steroids, and I think we ended up being like nothing of it, it was just all over the place.
“It was very unfocused, a lot of people say that a lot of things I’m doing with Ghost now is very reminiscent of what we used to do in Subvision, and that’s probably correct. Had time been on our side with Subvision, there’s a likelihood that that would have just continued and musically probably could have become what Ghost is, in a sense.
“But, since Subvision was sort of farting out and I was spending some time also in 2006 playing bass, friends of mine had a band and I was just playing bass just for fun.
“That was more recreational, in a way, because despite most of my time throughout my life have been spent being, like, the sort of dictator in my own band, I actually do enjoy just playing with others as well.”
