The Rapture comes to Manchester as Ghost kick off their Biblical new era on the beyond-all-expectation first night of the Skeletour World Tour.
At one point tonight, Ghost, so convincingly they give you no reason to doubt them, appear to be playing in Hell. At another, they lift the AO Arena from its housing in the shadow of Manchester Cathedral and place it somewhere in the celestial aether. Should it be a cathedral you want, they both build and destroy one during the course of two hours. And that’s not even really the main event.
Tobias Forge has been promising something special for the Skeletá world tour. But to picture merely bigger – more flames, larger stage, brighter lights – is to reveal only the shallow limits of your own imagination. Without a support to ease you in, tonight – and this tour – are about Ghost and only Ghost, showing you the outer limits of their universe.
A setup that would satisfy most bands playing a shed like this is different for almost every song, each pulling you into somewhere new. Every couple of minutes delivers something that’s as impressive in its scale as its creative ingenuity. Whispers in K!’s ear pre-show are that, having previously used eight or nine lorries to cart it all around, this time it takes no fewer than 20, and each venue needs to have an extra power supply to take the strain. Watching it, you wonder how it’s all enough.
And then there’s the all-new man up front, Papa V Perpetua himself. He looks like an, ahem, Satanized version of The Phantom Of The Opera, and carries himself with a roguish sense of command and grubbily elegant flair. But it’s in his sense of apparent urgency that this iteration of Ghost’s leading ghoul distinguishes himself most. The long, time-eating chat and crap jokes of old have been jettisoned, to the benefit of the enormous songs and the visual feast in which they are served, at a delightfully exhausting pace.
It's hard to talk about without spoiling the surprise. Which is also why, on entering the venue, fans are required to surrender their phone to a locked bag, on the warning that sinners will be cast out. For some, it was an idea that spelled doom for their fun. In practice, it makes you get even more lost in it all, and actually adds to the vibe when, between songs, there’s the rare spectacle of a leviathan room such as this being plunged into near total darkness. And this really is the sort of show that’ll make you jealous of people experiencing it for the first time.
You can see touchpoints: ’70s retro-futuristic sci-fi, a swelled band of Nameless Ghouls who now look like steampunk magicians and Bene Gesserit witches from Dune, an almost Monty Python-ish quality to some of the visuals. One bit looks like an ’80s TV gay club in a spaceship. It isn’t too much to say that another element has been gleefully borrowed wholesale from Judas Priest and expanded to brilliantly ludicrous proportions. Everything else is all bones and wings and sparkling and bedazzled macabre glory. It’s fucking brilliant.
When this comes together as the backdrop to the banging Ritual, a genuinely uplifting He Is, or versions of Rats and From The Pinnacle To The Pit that have never sounded more sinister, it feels totally unstoppable, like there is no roof on this thing. During Year Zero, the sing-along to the ascending chorus reaches such a fervour that you wonder how it can actually be brought back down again.
The four tracks aired off Skeletá slot into this brilliantly. Indeed, the band arrive with the as-yet unheard Peacefield, swiftly followed by the less-than-a-week-old Lachryma. What balls. What audacity. What genius that they still manage go from nought to 100 with it all from the second the first lights go up. With that as a starting point, by the time they wrap up two hours and change later with such rapturous versions of Dance Macabre and Square Hammer as they do here, they are so good all you can do is collapse into giddy joy.
Ghost already won years ago, a fact spoken to by the legions of Papas and evil nuns filling Manchester’s taxis and trains tonight, not to mention an almost total domination of Ghost shirts in the AO’s postcode. But even for a band with a magical ascent already logged, this all feels like a moment. Iron Maiden had the legendary World Slavery Tour, Metallica had their early ’90s Black Album run, and Slipknot truly arrived with the enormous Iowa campaign. With the Skeletour, Ghost can now count themselves among that rare group of bands whose blossoming moments didn’t just do for themselves, but will be remembered as a waymarker in metal’s history books.
“How do you like it?” enquires a delighted Papa, following an apocalyptic Mummy Dust. “How did I do?”
As if you have to ask, Father.
