Ghost frontman Tobias Forge has said that he doesn’t regret the ban on phones during the band’s most recent tour. Far from it. He has described it as “life-changing.”
The Swedish metal band raised eyebrows back in the spring when they announced that the European leg of their Skeletour jaunt was going to be phone-free, to encourage fans to be more interactive with the performance, rather than passively hoisting their phones in the air.
Now, at a Q&A event in Manchester HMV, Forge revealed that the policy has been a success. “(It’s been a) fucking life-changer. Life-changer for the existence of the band, absolutely,” he said. “Just walking off stage (on the) first night was just, like, ‘This has completely changed the entire outlook of how this feels’."
“I think that there are a lot of bands that are looking at this and just, like, ‘OK, so how do we do that too?’”
At the event, he talked about what prompted the idea – which, in his words, was playing venues where it was “18,000 people there and 10,000 phones”.
“They’re not even bouncing anymore. And you’re just like, ‘What is this? What has happened?’” he added.
“All of a sudden, the crowd that you’ve seen for 13 years has just got less and less and less engaged in exchange for these phones. What’s that about? What the fuck?”
“I came to a point where I was like, ‘I don’t think I wanna do this. If this is how it’s gonna be, I’d rather not do it’… That’s how worthless it became because of the phones. Especially at a show like ours.”
Of course, Ghost are far from the first act to go down this route. Jack White, Placebo and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have also instituted such a policy at some, if not all, their gigs. And last year Bob Dylan asked his audience to put their phones away on the UK leg of his Rough And Rowdy Ways tour. Many others will surely follow.
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