If you've somehow been living under a rock for the past eight years, then allow me to inform you about the band Ghost. Aside from frontman Tobias Forge playing many papal frontmen, the band's cast of characters is constantly revolving but always under the moniker of The Nameless Ghouls.
Forge tells iHeart Radio that his love of anonymous and fictional characters in a band stems from Kiss, and to a slightly lesser extent the mockumentary made about Sex Pistols called The Great Rock N' Roll Swindle. He says he aimed to be somewhere between the two groups in terms of being "screwed up," and given Ghost's success I'd say he's done a pretty good job.
"I've been interested in music for as long as I can remember. My first idols were Kiss. Ever since I was very, very little — like three or four years old — I wanted to entertain, and I wanted to entertain with music. But as I got a little bit older, and when I was able to read, I watched a lot of VHS video when I was a kid. And one favorite film that I had… One was, actually, about a band, but it was not necessarily so business oriented, [and that] was The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle, which painted a very vivid and weird idea of being a rock band, which completely sucked me in — I was completely in awe of that film.
"And, obviously, little did I understand at that point, but I understood later what a chaotic band and what a screwed-up career Sex Pistols had. But it definitely colored my thinking. I wanted a band to be somewhere in between Kiss and The Rolling Stones and Sex Pistols — just outrageous and over the top, [with] these fictional characters, basically."
Don't forget to catch Ghost on their massive fall North American tour coming up.
