Ghost’s Tobias Forge is hopeful that there will be more “headlining” rock bands in the future in response to the “rock is dead” debate.
The phrase has been thrown around for decades now with Kiss rocker Gene Simmons, 75, having said it several times over, but the 44-year-old Swedish singer has a more positive outlook.
In an interview with Consequence, he said: “I think it was Gene Simmons that said it most times, but I mean a lot of people have said that rock ‘n’ roll is dead and there will be no new headliners. I understand that it’s been sparse, but I think that with the unfortunate disappearance of a lot of bands that I like — Kiss being one of them — I do believe that with time I think that there will be more [headlining rock] bands.”
The Call Me Little Sunshine singer – whose band formed in 2006 and achieved their first Billboard number one album with sixth studio album, Skeletá, in May – insists it’s an “age thing” where music veterans mourn the way rock music used to be.
Praising the rise of his peers, he said: “There are a few examples of fairly new bands who’ve risen to great statures, faster than we did.
“I think that there’s this strange time phenomenon that happened somewhere in the 2000s where everything that was sort of old was old, and everything that came after was new, and just keeps on being labelled as new — especially by people who at the time were in their twenties or thirties or forties and now are in their forties, fifties, sixties. Which I think is an age thing.”
Tobias continued: “If you ask a lot of our fans who are 15 years old now, just the fact that our band has been around for 15 years — do you think that they think that we are a new band? No. And that’s how it should be. I think they are right in the sense that we’re an old established band. If our first album came out in 1980, and it’s now 1995, that’s an old band.”
Gene went as far as blaming music fans for killing rock ‘n’ roll.
He told Us Weekly: “The people that killed it are fans. Fans killed the thing they loved by downloading and file sharing for free.”