Papa Emeritus Is Dead, Long Live Ghost

It's a strange thing when musical lightning strikes. On paper, a group of Swedish 'ghouls' playing Blue Oyster Cult tunes with Mercyful Fate-level satanic lyrics really shouldn't work. However, since debuting with the superb Opus Eponymous in 2010, the band have caught fire.

From Darth Vader obsessed eight-year-old girls right through to middle-aged dad-rock aficionados (to give a range of actual fans known to The Music) Ghost have become an international phenomenon. With album number four, however, frontman Tobias Forge and his hired hands have delivered a set of songs that will take them into the stratosphere. Speaking of Mr Forge, why did he choose now to drop the infamous Papa Emeritus - a character that arguably drove much of the band's mysterious appeal?

"I think the Papa thing had to come to an end - and I didn't want the band to become stale. Besides - you have Cardinal Copia now," he laughs. "But to be honest despite the characters - and how I presented myself in the media - I didn't really feel anonymous all those years, in my day to day life anyway. After the show, I would sign records and meet fans as myself so I guess sitting here and talking to you as Tobias, and not as a nameless ghoul, isn't really that big of a deal for me."

Forge may wish he had kept his stage persona because he's about to get a whole lot more famous. Prequelle is an absolute corker that embraces the overtly commercial on Dance Macabre (already being called Ghost's I Was Made For Loving You), the heavy riffage of Faith and the gloriously melodic yet sombre Life Eternal - as well as two sterling instrumentals - Miasma and Helvetesfonster.

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• Album Review: Ghost - Prequelle

"When we made [2015's] Meliora we thought we were going to end up doing a lot of instrumentals for the album but it just didn't happen and in the end we only had a few token one-minute instrumental pieces," says Forge, trying to explain his slightly left-field decision this time around. "Last time even Cirice started off as a longer piece without the chorus and the pop structures but ended up turning into a vocal song. I'm a big fan of instrumental music and this time around I really wanted to explore that side of things and we came up with some great tunes."

And how the hell did Miasma end up with a saxophone solo that could have stood proudly on Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street?

"I've always wanted to do a saxophone solo!" laughs Forge, who confides that he'd included one on a pre-Ghost record that never saw the light of day. "As far as I'm concerned, the sax is like the highest gear you can go to in rock'n'roll gala and it was great to dust off the old sax for Miasma."

Although each individual track on Prequelle is strong, the album as a whole is sequenced as an emotional rollercoaster - contrasting the soft with the hard and the light with the dark. Forge says that this was no accident.

"Sequencing a record is to me like writing a film," he says. "You need an opening and closing sequence, you need a love scene, you need a car chase - everything has got to work together. If I make a piece of music that I like but that doesn't fit in the context of the overall album, I'll just put it aside. There's no ego in that, and to be honest it would have been harder to do it if I was in a band where everyone was writing, because no one would want to leave their material out.

"Every time I'm ready to do a new record I have leftover material that I can use - and with each record I do I try to improve and with this one I think we've done a great job."

Although sections of the metal community will be suspicious of the LP's commercial flavour, you can rest assured that the love of metal remains strong. Leaving aside Ghost's subversive habit of pairing hummable rock tracks with ghoulish lyrics (check out the references to rotting flesh on Witch Image) and it's clear that Forge remains a total metalhead at heart. He'll take Master Of Puppets over Ride The Lightning (just), Blizzard Of Ozz over Heaven And Hell, and Sunlight Studios over Morrisound Recording. He's even willing to chime in on his favourite Entombed LP.

"For years I would always choose Left Hand Path over Clandestine," he muses. "But I actually find Clandestine very compelling. I think though in the same way as I would now rather listen to Sabotage over Paranoid, I'd go for Clandestine now. It has a little more colour - it's a little more savoury," he laughs.