Ghost masteermind Tobias Forge sang praises of metal icons Black Sabbath. He said at this year’s Graspop Metal Meeting:
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“I am very inspired by Black Sabbath. I’ve listened to Black Sabbath for almost as long as I can remember, and I want Ghost to be a lot like a band like Black Sabbath – what they were when they made, in my opinion, their best records, in the mid-’70s. Very experimental, very progressive, very brave.
“Obviously everybody loves Black Sabbath and they get so much credit, but I think that sometimes it is annoying that they don’t get credit for how fucking brave they were in 1973, ’74, ’75 when they made [1973’s] ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,’ [1975’s] ‘Sabotage,’ [1972’s] ‘Vol. 4.’
“I am way more influenced by those than I am by their two first records. And I want Ghost to be a band like that. No, I don’t want to sound like Black Sabbath, but I want my band to be as brave and progressive.
“And unfortunately in this day and age – I think that once heavy metal became a little bit of an establishment, it’s also shown a side that is quite conservative and has a lot of dogmatic rules. It is what it is, it comes with age.
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“Heavy metal is embraced by a very big span of ages, so you will always have the elders who are protective and teach the younger people of how things should be. And I mean, if we get started on mid-’80s death metal, I will be extremely anal. So I am also responsible for that sort of one-sidedness, I would say. But I think we’re a metal band, at the end of the day.”
