In which the beautiful “Star Trek” future of Meliora was replaced with the plague of the Dark Ages, Prequelle found Ghost ascending to greater heights while simultaneously defeating attempts to clip their wings. With this new sense of wrath came a different leader, the suave, young Cardinal Copia, and under his stewardship, they turned Wembley into their very own cathedral…
When it came time to discuss Ghost’s fourth album, Prequelle, and its relationship to Meliora, Tobias Forge described it as “the hangover” to its predecessor.
While Meliora had been a godless album, although one set in what he described as a “Utopian, Star Trek future”, Prequelle would deal with God visiting his wrath upon mankind in a despicable form. That album had been lavish in sound and the scope of its vision, not to mention the swelled number of personnel involved – Prequelle would be a more streamlined affair, musically and logistically, with much of it made by Tobias and producer Tom Dalgety.
This was important, not just as an artistic response to what had come before, but because there was something else occupying the thoughts of Ghost’s mastermind.
In April 2017, former band members Simon Söderberg, Henrik Palm, Martin Hjertstedt and Mauro Rubino filed a lawsuit, accusing Tobias of cheating them out of their rightful share of monies, thereby revealing his identity as Papa Emeritus.
Tobias had been unmasked before, courtesy of Behemoth frontman Nergal. At the FortaRock Festival in 2014 where Behemoth and Ghost both performed, Nergal posted a snap of him with Tobias accompanied by the caption, “If you have ghosts… you have everything,” a reference to the Roky Erickson song covered on their 2013 EP. Given that this was three years before Tobias was revealed as the man behind Papa, it caused some panic. And while the picture was quickly deleted, the cat was out of the bag for some.
This time, however, this glimpse behind Ghost’s altar was messier. Thankfully, the case was dismissed after a six-day trial, with the four men ordered to pay Tobias’ legal fees, which amounted to around two million Swedish krona ($225,000).
“It was a bit of an aikido move, where you let the enemy do most of the tripping,” Tobias later told us. “Let them wear themselves down by moving too much. I was not the one screaming ‘Look at me!’ during that time. I was like, ‘Okay, now use the spotlight – use it to show what you’re worth.’ Throughout that period, I was very busy making a new record.”
That new record was Prequelle.
Before Prequelle, however, there was the Popestar EP. And before Tom Dalgety’s work on both, there had been his unsuccessful try-out for Meliora.
“I actually did a mix on [Meliora’s first single] Cirice,” recalls Tom, a fan of Ghost since hearing the demo of Elizabeth on Myspace in 2010, and who’d worked on records by Killing Joke, Opeth, Pixies and Royal Blood.
“I didn’t get the [Meliora] gig, which, at the time, I was fucking gutted about. But I lost out to Andy Wallace, who’s one of my heroes, so I’m at peace with that. I guess I wasn’t a complete flop, though, because they got in touch about the EP that became Popestar.”
Unlike Ghost’s 2013 EP, this time around there was a brand-new song, Square Hammer, which would become a fan favourite, argued by many as the band’s best.
“Tobias felt he wanted a really instant, impactful song for opening shows because the opening track on the first few records was generally atmospheric and a slow burn,” reveals Tom. “He really wanted something that smacked you in the face straight away.”
Tom knew Square Hammer’s potential as soon as he heard the demo version Tobias worked on with Niels Nielsen, aka the cowbell-playing Nameless Ghoul, which packed a punch even when Tom listened to it on his phone while out shopping.
“It had that Motown groove from the intro and the verse that continued all the way through,” he remembers. “I immediately thought we had to go full Scorpions and AC/DC and go to a regular back beat in the chorus, which I texted back. So, essentially, pre-production work started in the Frome branch of Argos.”
The resulting EP would include impeccable covers of songs by Echo & The Bunnymen (Nocturnal Me), Simian Mobile Disco (I Believe) and Eurythmics (Missionary Man), with Tom proving his hands-on credentials to deliver the spoken-word part in Bible, their version of the song by Swedish post-punks Imperiet. What’s more, Popestar was recorded at Gardenia Studio, a pristine space with the feel of a youth club, located in Linköping, which gave the producer a vivid sense of Tobias’ hometown influences.
“It was April 2016, so during Easter,” recalls Tom. “There was a lot of religious iconography being bandied around.”
It was on the accompanying Popestar Tour in 2017 that Ghost graduated to the status of festival headliners in the UK, when they topped the bill on the Saturday night at Bloodstock where, as well as Iron Maiden’s lighting engineer, their show included giant staging, fire galore, and a sense that you were watching the next great stadium band. Oh, and a load of kids.
“We said, ‘Let’s not think at all about economics,’” Tobias told Kerrang!. “We said, ‘We have four fire canisters? Why not 16? More is more! Nuns? Let’s get 20. And a children’s choir!”
“My brother, Adam, went to speak to the local schools in order to find a choir,” recalls Bloodstock director Vicky Hungerford. “They were given the lyrics to the chorus of [Monstrance Clock, from Infestissumam] and the kids were allowed to bring their parents. The show went down incredibly well. It was the kind of music and concept and live show that British metal fans love. They had a huge production and people dressed as nuns giving out Ghost condoms!”
And what of the persistent rumour that Dave Grohl might have made a clandestine appearance on drums for the band’s set?
“I hadn’t heard that,” laughs Vicky. “On the day they were very hush-hush, and I respected the privacy that the rest of the band didn’t want to be divulged, bar Tobias. So, it wouldn’t surprise me. Why not Dave Grohl?!”
Perhaps there’s something to it, because during an interview with AL.com in September 2022, when asked if Dave has ever dressed up as a Nameless Ghoul and performed with Ghost, Tobias confirmed he had, though didn’t confirm where, when, or in what context.
“I’m going to have to answer your question from a very legal point of view, where I say yes,” he responded. “He has technically put on Ghoul clothes and played drums together with us in a Ghost concept.”
The case remains open…
While there was no guarantee that work on Popestar would win Tom Dalgety the gig for Ghost’s fourth album, Square Hammer would become the band’s first U.S. Billboard Number One which, combined with his subsequent work on 2017’s Ceremony And Devotion live album, certainly made a persuasive case.
By the time Tom and Tobias reconvened to make Prequelle, in the autumn of 2017, the latter was under a significant amount of pressure, with the lawsuit rattling on for the duration of the recording process.
“That was obviously a fairly sizeable distraction,” empathises Tom. “But I think it fuelled [Tobias’] fire in a weird way – it gave him something to channel his vitriol into. And that’s why in songs like Rats and Faith, you can hear what was going on in his mind there.”
Indeed, as well as having a title that could be viewed as pointed, Rats featured lyrics like, ‘In times of turmoil / In times like these / Beliefs contagious / Spreading disease,’ that now, with the benefit of hindsight, could be viewed through the lens of reality.
Alternatively, Prequelle is also a record about the bubonic plague. While Meliora had served as “a record that was infused with the absence of God” as Tobias would tell K!, “Prequelle is the answer to that, where the hand of doom has come down and struck upon this godless society. For a long time, it was referred to as ‘The Plague Album’. The plague was such a manifestation of God’s wrath.”
While Meliora’s lavishness had been a statement of intent, its follow-up would be more streamlined. Tobias made this easy for his producer thanks to his ability to visualise what the band would look like performing these new songs onstage, so would know when each part needed to come in, thereby keeping things within the realms of what was playable.
Plus, Ghost had a relatively simple live set-up, which provided a set of parameters to work within.
“It was nice that [Tobias] was dictating that,” admits Tom. “Because often that’s my role as producer, to come in and say, ‘Hey, when this really important vocal part is happening, there probably shouldn’t be loads of crazy drum fills’ – and that can sometimes upset the apple cart.”
That fastidious planning meant Tobias knew that on Prequelle, Cardinal Copia would have replaced Papa Emeritus III. In the lore perpetuated by the ongoing webisode series on the band’s YouTube channel, the Cardinal was reportedly the first Ghost singer not to be part of the Emeritus bloodline. He was, however, more nimble and less encumbered by their traditional robes, making him a more energetic onstage presence. This therefore needed to be reflected in the vocals.
“Rats is a very sprightly tune,” says Tom. “So are songs like Faith and Witch Image. Everything’s considered and deliberate, so those songs being suited to a more youthful iteration would have been, too. You can’t really imagine Papa I performing a song like Rats.”
Despite Prequelle’s heavy theme, and the drama during its conception, the album features some of the Ghost’s catchiest creations in Dance Macabre and Life Eternal. The former was heavily influenced by Queen, as Tobias admired the musical flexibility in their move from rock to disco on their 1982 album, Hot Space. Unlike songs like Rats, Faith, and instrumentals Miasma and Helvetesfonster, all of which were built from the ground up in the studio, Dance Macabre and Life Eternal had existed in demo form.
“It was a breath of fresh air for me as those are two really beautifully crafted pop songs,” says Tom. “Sometimes you want to get a Mars bar – you don’t want to have to make a dessert from scratch.”
In the Kerrang! review of Prequelle, we commended the album’s juxtaposition of darkness and brilliantly accessible tunes, though noted its relative brevity: ‘With one of its 10 tracks being the intro and two being instrumentals, it’s really down to the bones here.’ Tobias later told Revolver that “the reason why I didn’t find strength to write at least one more hard rock song to put on there was because I couldn’t. I was not in the state where I could do that.”
Tom, however, thinks there are always those regrets in hindsight.
“We were inspired by a lot of the great ’70s hard rock that did follow that kind of format,” the producer reveals, “where there were one of several rock bangers and then some quite experimental other stuff. It just works.”
It certainly worked at the Kerrang! Awards on June 19, 2019, where Prequelle scooped the Best Album gong, beating stiff competition from Behemoth, Bring Me The Horizon, Architects and Greta Van Fleet. By that time, though, much had moved on in Ghost’s world.
Three months later, on September 13, they unveiled the Seven Inches Of Satanic Panic EP, which extended the band’s lore back into the past, via songs apparently written in 1969 by Papa Nihil, whose saxophone work on instrumental Miasma was a highlight of Prequelle’s live shows. Despite courting nostalgia, the song Mary On A Cross was embraced by modernity, becoming a TikTok sensation that garnered 737 million streams.
On November 22, Ghost headlined London’s OVO Arena Wembley, with a show that now boasted plague doctors, numerous costume changes, and what K!’s review described as ‘Strictly-quality dancing’ from Cardinal Copia, who also rode around the stage on a comically tiny tricycle. There was no telling how big this thing could get, even if Tobias’ aspirations, post-Wembley triumph, were more modest: “I’m just glad we haven’t soiled ourselves doing it.”
Perhaps in recognition of his valiant service, during Ghost’s Mexico City show on March 3, 2020, with Papa Nihil having expired during his sax solo – ironically ending the plague era just as COVID arrived – Cardinal Copia was promoted to Papa Emeritus IV. Given that he’d go on to front album number five, this made him the first frontman to last for two successive Ghost record.
And with that, it was time to enter the age of Impera…
This feature originally appeared in the special edition Kerrang! Presents Ghost magazine
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